Only the black Ag Dept. official who talked to an NAACP group last March and the white farmers she really did help emerged with “grace and dignity intact” from the recent brouhaha, says Chi Trib’s Clarence Page.
The culprits included the Obama White House, Ag Secy. Vilsack, NAACP’s Jealous, and Fox host O’Reilly, who at least draws a major media pay check. But the one Page concentrates on is the “blogger . . . defiant dope,” shame-lacking, guilty-hand-washing Andrew Breitbart, who ran a video clip out of context and set off a panic among Obama aides, the Ag Secy, and the NAACP leadership, all of whom responded like scared kittens and ultimately blamed other people. “We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles,” said President Obama, for instance.
Naturally, Page concentrates on Breitbart. Besides nailing ACORN some months back, he “was [this time] after the NAACP,” because of its “recent call for the tea party movement to rid itself of ‘racist elements.’” Breitbart said running the Sherrod clip was “about tarring . . . the tea party movement with the false charge of racism,” to which Page, in full sardonic mode: “Right.” Moreover, Breitbart runs “willfully conservative Web sites” — the worst kind, we might add.
“Bring it on,” says Page. “There’s plenty of room on the Web,” adding, as if we were not in at least the second decade of Internet warfare: “Let the consumers decide whose version of journalism is worth their time.” You’d think he’d go light with that sort of talk.
For consumers he had straight-from-the-shoulder advice: “Keep a healthy skepticism.” For practitioners of “citizen journalism,” he had “Remember the old school lesson . . .: Getting the story right is better than getting it first.” That old-school wisdom, from a seasoned practitioner.
And then another nostrum that an old-school practitioner might just hesitate to pronounce in a time of widespread plunging mainstream circulation and plummeting reader and viewer confidence: “Bad journalism eventually produces its own punishment.” Bankruptcy, for instance.
In any case, readers can now (at last) view Breitbart’s work “with [again] the healthy skepticism that it deserves.” Thank heaven.
As for the other culprits, “the folks in the White House and the NAACP,” he has this: “Don’t let fear of a charge of racism from the right impair your common sense. . . . Don’t take the bait.” Thing never to forget is you’re not the racists. It’s the other guys.
Blithe Spirit 
Clarence Page is SO past his “use by date.” Can’t he and Mary Mitchell ever see beyond race?
Breitbart showed exactly what he intended. The NAACP audience lapped up Sherrod’s story of discriminating against a poor white farmer. Her later “conversion” from being a racist to a classist, i.e. Marxist, notwithstanding, the audience was just fine with her poor treatment of a man who was probably dying inside at having to ask for help.
This is the point that is conveniently ignored by Page and most of the Left. As our parents would have said, “Consider the source.”
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Well said about the farmer dying inside and the audience lapping it up. She had the delivery just right, was talking their language.
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I agree and have thought the unheard story was the NAACP’s reaction to Sherrod’s mistreatment of the farmer. I think O’Reilly on Fox News noted that the audience was laughing at that point. Turn it around with a white audience enjoying a white person’s mistreating a black, and the story would be front page. Breitbart was targeting the NAACP and, though he exposed hypocrisy, the news was his own downfall.
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Poor Clarence – that MSNBC coinage went up his nasal passages.
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