Some Conservative Columnists Still Reluctant To Criticize Breitbart
July 28, 2010 10:27 am ET by Joe Strupp
A week after Andrew Breitbart's posting of an edited video falsely billed as Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod making racist comments -- which led to her firing and later attempted rehire -- some leading conservative columnists remain reluctant to blame Breitbart for the situation.
A number of them even said Breitbart should not be held to the same standards as other journalists because he is a blogger and has an activist agenda.
Syndicated Columnist Pat Buchanan said if Breitbart only received the video clip and did not edit it from the original speech, he is not to blame: "The problem still lies with the (Obama) Administration who fired this woman who was quite innocent. I can't criticize Mr. Breitbart if I don't know if he was the one who excerpted the speech."
Buchanan added: "I don't know Mr. Breitbart and the exact role he played. There are folks who use his stuff on the air."
Asked how this has affected Breitbart's image, Buchanan noted, "He is much better known than he was. He is a blogger who bounced the government of the United States."
Sherrod, the former Agriculture Department Georgia Director of Rural Development, was the victim of Breitbart's actions last week when he posted an edited video on his BigGovernment.com site. The video was part of a speech Sherrod gave to a NAACP group in March.
Sherrod was forced to resign on July 19 in response to Breitbart posting the video.
In the edited tape, she spoke about how she had not initially helped a white farmer as much as she could have in 1986 when he was going to lose his farm. Breitbart's post and the video itself falsely claimed that the story had occurred during her time as a federal official and not 24 years ago when she worked for a non-profit organization.
Breitbart also did not include the entire context of the speech, in which Sherrod later explained that she learned from the situation and ended up helping the farmer, Roger Spooner and his wife. In subsequent interviews with CNN, the Spooners credited Sherrod with saving their farm.
Still, Breitbart's actions have been slow to draw criticism from some of his conservative brethren.
"I think he serves a positive function, exploring a lot of things that other media do not want to cover," said Michael Barone, a syndicated columnist whose work also appears through Creators Syndicate. "Some people can criticize him for not providing access to the full excerpt of the speech. But I think it didn't hurt him."
Adds Debra Saunders, a conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist and syndicated scribe for Creators Syndicate: "I don't think it changes anything. I consider him to be a blogger, not an expert on solid journalism." She did blog that Breitbart should be criticized for posting the video clip.
Tony Blankley, former editorial page editor of The Washington Times and a syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate, played down Breitbart's influence, saying he rarely read the right-winger's items.
"I don't think I have ever read three sentences that Breitbart has ever written," said Blankley. "I don't know what he claims to be; I have never seen an act of journalism from him."
Blankley contends that Breitbart, as an activist blogger, is not expected to meet the same journalistic standards as others. "I see him more as a conservative activist entrepreneur," he added. "There is a spectrum of opinion that starts with genuine journalism, a classic columnist, and then the other end where you have straight out propaganda. Then you have this range of people that fall in the middle."
Blankley even defended Breitbert's excerpting the Sherrod speech, saying such actions are common among news outlets. "Nobody reports a whole hour of a speech," Blankley said. "People are constantly taking out of context. There is nothing unique about that charge."
Glaring instances in my lifetime have been:
a) The "red" scares where no one would dare point out that most of the hysteria was just that - ill-informed hysteria aimed at things that people didn't understand. Most of the "anti-communist" brigade didn't know the first thing about Communism - they only knew that they were supposed to be against it.
b) Obscenity laws where people would not speak out against them because they had been conned into believing that everyone else was in favour of them and that they would become a pariah if they broke ranks
c) The "War" on Drugs - until relatively recently it was a brave person indeed who spoke out against absurd, pointless criminalisation of various intoxicants. The evil promoted by this failure to learn the lesson of Prohibition in the 1920s is as obvious as the nose on your face to anyone who looks at the southern border of the U.S. and points further on.
d) Currently, the bully boys and girls of the lunar right wing media in the U.S. (and increasingly in other parts of the English speaking world) have conned many of the established media that their appalling rubbish is indicative of the ordinary reasonably minded person (what Lord Justice Bowen referred to as "the man on the Clapham omnibus). This latter version of "The Terror" where established media outlets are afraid of speaking out against the outright lies and calumnies continually being excreted by these dregs of humanity may seem quite benign compared to its French original, but the character assassination and the human wreckage that it leaves in its wake is no less traumatic.
A little discernment and courage would go a long way.