wings of justice award

As one of our readers and commentators pointed out in an e-mail to us, the Obama White House has, in the past, been highly critical of FOX Fraudcasting for its bias and even boycotted the station for a period of time. 

But it is one thing to talk the talk and another thing to walk the walk

The White House may criticize the right wing media, but they react like dogs having their collars yanked whenever one of the Breitbart, Drudge, Limbaugh, FOX, Beck style of right wing character assassination squad goes after an executive branch staffer.  In short, they cave in because of their fear of the right wing white voter, as if those psychotic people are going to support anything about the Obama administration anyway.

So talk is not good enough when your Rahm Emanuel craven fear of the mythical center-right voter actions undercut your spoken words.  In the Shirley Sherrod affair, Andrew Breitbart knew how to make the White House look like fools and the Obama Administration fell for it.  That's the bottom line.

But out of the usual craven D.C. Democratic immediate surrender to falsified right wing accusation routine emerged a heroine from the great pool of common Americans who aren't afraid of the right wing lie machine.  Shirley Sherrod, whose father was shot to death by a white man during the Civil Rights movement, is a specialist in poor rural agriculture who lives in Georgia.  She was summarily fired by the Obama Administration based on yet another selectively edited video by Breitbart. 

When the full video was seen, Sherrod stood out as a model of racial tolerance and reaching out to whites.  The Obama Administration had to quickly backtrack and apologize to Sherrod and offer her a new job.   Sherrod was asked to be on several news programs, and she acquitted herself with the kind of aplomb and courage that you would expect from the White House.  You might paraphrase Aaron Copeland and say that Shirley Sherrod is deserving of "fanfare for the common woman."

Too bad, we don have more Shirley Sherrods advising the President and overseeing communications in the White House.  She is much more valuable to beat back the barbarians at the gate than a Rahm Emanuel who flinches and capitulates when the WH is falsely attacked by the right, but has nothing but foul words for the left.

Shirley Sherrod, you more than deserve the BuzzFlash Wings of Justice Award.

Shirley Sherrod, a Common American of Uncommon Courage, Shows the White House to be Presidential Against Right Wing Media Thugs | BuzzFlash.org

Enough right-wing propaganda

By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Monday, July 26, 2010; A13

The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable moment." It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president's inner circle.

Obama complained on ABC's "Good Morning America" that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack "jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles." But it's his own apparatus that turned "this media culture" into a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he "invented the Internet," but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.

There were no "death panels" in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow "the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly." That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.