News and activism in this wonderful new media world…

Shirley Sherrod is probably a name most of us have never heard. But she was until recently a federal employee in the US Department of Agriculture, the head of rural development for the agriculture department in Georgia to be precise.

She’s now best known for being dismissed summarily after conservative activist Andrew Breitbart placed a clip on the web of a speech she gave at an NAACP meeting some months ago where she was seen saying as reported by William Saletan in Slate :

Twenty-four years ago, Shirley Sherrod helped Roger Spooner save his farm. She was black, and he was white, but they were more than that. They were two people working together to keep a South Georgia family on its land.
…
It was 1986. She was working for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund. He was a farmer seeking help against foreclosure. “He was trying to show me he was superior to me,” Sherrod told the NAACP audience. “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farm land, and here I was, faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do.” She told the audience that she “took him to a white lawyer” because “I figured if I’d take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him.”

Breitbart pitched the above as proof positive that Sherrod was a racist who could even 24 years later… ‘[manage] her federal duties … through the prism of race and class distinctions.’

His motivation for doing this was to open up yet another front in the on-going war of words between the Tea Party and the NAACP – the latter having suggested (not without reason it has to be said) that some elements in the former are racist.

Sherrod was dismissed by the USDA on foot of this. The NAACP put out a profoundly critical statement about her. Only thing is that the clip ended too quickly and no one bothered to check out the rest of her speech.

Because Sherrod went on to say:

I spent time there in my office calling everybody I could think so to try to see—help me find the lawyer who would handle this. … Working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t. You know—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. … God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people. It’s about poor people. … I’ve come to realize that we have to work together. … We have to get to the point, as Toni Morrison said, [where] race exists, but it doesn’t matter.

Obviously this is an entirely perverse outcome where someone can be dismissed over clearly unfounded allegations. I’m not sure I fully agree with Saletan’s thesis that both left and right are implicated in this to the same degree. It seems to me that Breibart is responsible for a sin of commission, the NAACP for a sin of omission [although one which seriously compounded the situation], but it speaks of a pernicious dynamic where there is no effort to attempt to discover what the truth of the matter is.

In any case it appears Sherrod is coming out fighting, and fair dues to her, with talk of litigation.

I’ve written earlier this week about the partial and arguably partisan leaking of conclusions from an NCC/Forfás report to the media and the use by the media of those conclusions entirely uncontextualised and with no caveats. I won’t attempt to place that in an hierarchy with the Sherrod case. Both indicate an absolute avoidance of serious reflection or analysis.

And being for a second parochial it aligns with something about the CLR that has often been put to me, which is ‘what scoops have you published?’. None that I can think of, thank God. I’ve heard one or two rumours that have turned out to be true, but so – most likely – have most of us. I’ve also had on very rare occasions people pass material on which I’ve tended to avoid reposting because there’s little to be gained in becoming a proxy for someone else’s war.

And to be honest as demonstrated above scoops are prey to gaps in knowledge, too rapid interpretation, too uncritical a release. The other side is that that’s never been the function of the CLR , and one could add it simply doesn’t have and never will have a profile high enough to be able to do that even if the intention was there. I, and I’m pretty sure the other contributors, aren’t that pushed about getting information into the public domain first. More important is the issue of considering what information freely available means.

What’s interesting, and distressing, about the Sherrod example is that clearly no-one thought to do that. Breitbart comes out of this particularly badly because both on a human level, in terms of the impact on Sherrod’s career and reputation but also on a professional level it demonstrates a complete lack of thought or effort to consider whether this was something that would blow up in his face.

He’s now reduced, as Saletan notes, to the following:

Unembarrassed by the exposure of his politically edited video, Breitbart continues to caricature Sherrod. Last night, he posted an excerpt in which she talks sadly about black farmers selling their land. She tells the audience that race is no predictor of virtue, noting that she has worked with honest whites and exploitative blacks. Breitbart’s headline ignores these inconvenient reflections. It shouts: “Shirley Sherrod Laments Land Being Sold to White Man.”

That’s all very well, and no doubt he’ll live to agitate another day, but his own reputation takes a substantial hit – and although clearly previously seen as partisan, now he’s partisan with added extra ineptitude. But what is Breitbart, stuck between activism and news generation/commentary? He’s not a journalist. He’s not quite a commentator (though he was, and for all I know still is, an associate of Matt Drudge). He is some mix of both and more. As indeed are an increasing number of people online.

Which only points to the fact that overall this blurring of the lines between ‘news’ and ‘commentary’ doesn’t demand lower standards of research, but instead higher standards.

Last year there was considerable debate online on matters economic, much more so than this year – although that may be changing. One of the more (or few – depending upon taste) positive aspects of that was that it required a digging into the data, such as it was, and weighing it as best as was possible. What it didn’t, and doesn’t, require are instant conclusions based as much on initial prejudice – from whatever position.