Fox correspondent James Rosen is angry about the shabby treatment his network and Andrew Breitbart have been receiving over the smear of former USDA official Shirley Sherrod.
According to Rosen, Sherrod, the NAACP, and the Obama administration are propagating a “great myth”: that “the clips that Mr. Breitbart posted concealed from the public the fact that Sherrod's tale in her speech last March was actually one of redemption.” According to Rosen, “The Breitbart clips clearly included a portion that substantiated Sherrod's later claim that she was inveighing against reverse racism, not glorifying it. And I reported this at noon on this channel yesterday.”
Rosen's evidence is Sherrod's vague-at-best statement at the end of the Breitbart clip, “That's when it was revealed to me that y'all, it's about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white -- it is about white and black, but it's not -- you know, it opened my eyes.”
That's right. Rosen wants you to think that Breitbart was acting fairly, and it is his attackers who are at fault. Watch:
What did the Breitbart clip cut out? Well, there's the lead-in to the story, where Sherrod says that she had originally made a commitment to “black people only,” but that “God will show you things and he'll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.” There's Sherrod's extensive discussion of everything she did to help the farmer. There's her statement that “working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't... and they could be black, and they could be white, they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have.” And so on, and so on, and so on.
And, of course, there's the fact that Breitbart's blog post introducing the clip called it “video evidence of racism” on Sherrod's part. Apparently, he missed the memo that the clip actually showed “she was inveighing against reverse racism, not glorifying it.”
Rosen's Fox News colleagues also must have missed that memo -- after Breitbart posted the clip, they repeatedly smeared her as a racist.
When even Jonah Goldberg says a right-wing activist needs to apologize, it's probably time to stop defending him.