Fox News Watchdog

The lesson of Shirley Sherrod’s disgraceful treatment by right-wing and not-so-right-wing media (followed by her equally squalid dismissal by an administration that took that media at face value) boils down to a single question: When will journalists see Andrew Breitbart as the serial promoter of journalistic frauds that he is, rather than as a legitimate source for story ideas?

FAIR readers will remember Breitbart’s dissemination of videos that purported to show ACORN employees advising a “prostitute” and her “pimp” — conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe–on how to avoid paying taxes. The videos have since been heavily debunked. As FAIR has noted before (Action Alert, 3/11/10), O’Keefe didn’t “pose” as a pimp–he didn’t wear his ridiculous  “pimp” outfit inside ACORN offices, and in almost every case pretended to be a concerned boyfriend trying to get his girlfriend away from an abusive pimp. He also did not receive advice on how to “cheat” on his taxes. Additionally,  ACORN has been cleared of wrongdoing by three separate independent investigations.

Breitbart’s latest fraud–posting a selectively edited video in which Sherrod appears to make some overtly racist statements to a local NAACP chapter–led to the forced resignation of the USDA employee.

That video went viral in the right-wing media and beyond, as accusations of Sherrod’s racism were tossed about, along with the larger implication that the Obama administration harbored racists. As Sherrod tells it, she soon received three separate calls telling her the White House was asking for her resignation, with one official telling her she would be on Glenn Beck that night.

The Sherrod story didn’t actually make it on Beck that night, but it was all over Fox News. Bill O’Reilly (7/19/10) called Sherrod’s comments “unacceptable” and called for her to “resign immediately.”  Sean Hannity (7/19/10) called the comments “racist” and praised Breitbart for exposing them.

The next day, as details of Sherrod’s entire speech emerged, it became clear she was describing her experience of struggling with and surmounting bias. Her point was an anti-racist one. Even the white farmer who was allegedly wronged by Sherrod appeared on CNN (7/20/10), along with his wife, to defend her.

Predictably, many right-wing media personalities stood by Breitbart even as the truth was being revealed. Rush Limbaugh (7/20/10) said Breitbart did “great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism.”  Hannity (7/20/10) invited Breitbart on his show to defend himself.  Meanwhile, O’Reilly (7/20/10) stood by his demand for Sherrod’s resignation, and even chastised the rest of the media for not reporting on Breitbart’s heavily edited video–adding it to a long list of invented right-wing controversies he believes have been ignored by the mainstream media, including the aforementioned ACORN hoax, as well as the  New Black Panther voter intimidation “scandal” and the Van Jones resignation–both of which were wildly overblown (Counterspin, 7/16/10; Extra!, 11/09), but were, contrary to O’Reilly’s protestations, picked up by more centrist media after amplification in the right-wing echo chamber.

The same is true of the Sherrod resignation, which some outlets continued to frame as a he said/she said controversy even after the truth began to emerge–outlets such as AP (7/20/10), which also took the opportunity to laud Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com as the site that “gained fame after releasing video of workers for the community organizing group ACORN counseling actors posing as a pimp and prostitute.”

In the Washington Post (7/21/10), Karen Tumulty and Krissah Thompson were still lending credence to Breitbart’s video even after the entire speech was released, reporting on the episode as a controversy between Sherrod and “her critics” as well as one that reinforces the right-wing narrative “that the administration of the first African-American to occupy the White House practices its own brand of racism.”

It isn’t surprising that right-wing media continue to exalt Breitbart, but when will the rest of the corporate media learn that he can’t be trusted?

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Fox News spent much of July 19 and 20 ginning up controversy about the false claim that Shirley Sherrod made racist remarks at a NAACP meeting earlier this year. As the claim unraveled, Fox media personalities disappeared their role in the story, continued to smear her as “descriminat[ory]” in the face of contradictory evidence, and boldly suggested the network did not contribute to the controversy.

Fox’s initial reaction: “Racist” Sharrod “must
resign”

O’Reilly: “Sherrod must resign,” her
remarks are “unacceptable.” On the July 19 edition
of his show, Bill O’Reilly played the edited portion of the tape and said “that is simply unacceptable. And Ms. Sherrod must resign
immediately.” He also falsely claimed that “the full transcript of Ms. Sherrod’s
remarks is posted on BigGovernment.com.”

Hannity called Sherrod’s remarks “[j]ust the
latest in a series of racial incitents,” called for the NAACP to be “held to account” to repudiate
Sherrod. On the July 19 edition
of his Fox News show, Sean Hannity asserted that Sherrod’s comments were “[j]ust
the latest in a series of racial incidents,” and stated that “So it’s
interesting that it took the new media to expose this.” He also asked Newt
Gingrigh if, “in light of the NAACP accusing the Tea Party of being a racist
movement last week,” he thought “the NAACP should be held to account for the
very standard they were demanding from the Tea Party.”

Perino: “This video adds fuel to a growing
controversy after the NAACP” asked the tea party to denounce racists.
On the July 19 edition
of On the Record, Dana Perino
suggested Sherrod’s remarks were racist, saying that “The video adds fuel to a
growing controversy after the NAACP approved a resolution condemning the tea
party movement for not denouncing racist members.”

Doocy: Sherrod “sure sounded racist,”
is “[e]xhibit A” of “what racism looks like.” On the July 19
edition
of Fox &
Friends, co-host Steve Doocy said that Sherrod made “a speech to the
NAACP that sure sounded racist.” Later, after guest-host Ailysn Camerota
asserted that Sherrod’s remarks are “outrageous and perhaps everybody needs a
refresher course on what racism looks like,” Doocy responded that Sherrod’s
comments are “Exhibit A.”

Beck plays “videotape of USDA
administration official discriminating against white farmers.”
On the July 20
edition of his radio show, Beck says that they
“have videotape of a USDA administration official discriminating against white
farmers.” He then asks, “Have we suddenly transported into 1956 except it’s the
other way around? … Does anybody else have a sense that there are some that just
want revenge? Doesn’t it feel that way?” After playing the audio of the tape,
Beck says, “You tell me what part of the gospel is teaching that.”

After the
tide turned: Fox “didn’t even do” the Sherrod story

Bret Baier absurdly claims Fox News
“didn’t even do” the Sherrod story. On the July 20 edition of
Special Report, Bret Baier
claimed “Fox News didn’t even do the story, we didn’t do it on Special Report, we posted it online.”

Beck on Fox: “Based on the facts that we have
right now, this is something that I wouldn’t air and demand a resignation on.”
On the July 20
edition of this Fox News show, Beck stated:
“I don’t think Shirley should have been fired — or, I’m sorry, forced to
resign. Based on the facts that we have right now, this is something that I
wouldn’t air and demand a resignation on.” He added that he “wouldn’t air” the
tape because “context
matters.”

Doocy on Sherrod: “What
was the big hurry for them to condemn her in the first place?” On the July 21 edition of Fox & Friends, Dana Perino and Steve
Doocy falsely
asserted that, in Perino’s words, “before the news even broke, she had
resigned.” Perino then stated that “everyone’s nerves are raw and exposed on
these racial questions, and I think we should all look before we leap.” Doocy
then stated: “What was the big hurry for them to condemn her in the first place?
I don’t get it, because the totality of what she said was out there.”

Rosen: “Did the White House
essentially railroad an innocent woman in this?” On the July
20 edition of Fox News’ Happening Now, James Rosen reported that
the additional context from Sherrod’s speech “appeared to corroborate” her
statement that she was telling the story of “how she came to see beyond race,”
and then asked: “Did the White House essentially railroad an innocent woman in
this because they are on edge themselves because of the Van Jones controversy,
the Black Panthers Party case, and other controversies?

The holdouts: Sherrod was still “discriminating” against
the farmer

Hannity doubles down, says Sherrod “still admits
discriminating,” suggested he’s unfairly “getting blamed.” On
the July 20 edition of
his show Hannity asserted that “She still admits
that she was
discriminating against this white farmer.” He added that “I’m getting blamed
and Fox News is getting blamed, but it’s the White House that made the decision before we ever aired the tape.”

O’Reilly’s ignores context, still
claims “What [Sherrod] said is ridiculous.” On the July 20
edition of his show, O’Reilly was still claiming
that “What [Sherrod] said is ridiculous,” and stated the real story is “the news
blackout” on the Sherrod story, and how “the establishment press tilts left and
is reluctant to do damage to a very liberal president.”

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There’s a headline currently runnning here at the Huffington Post that made me do a double take the first time I saw it, and which led me to immediately check to see if it was something that had been filed under the comedy banner; it just felt — and feels — too much like the kind of dead-on satire I’d expect from Chris Kelly or Andy Borowitz.

It reads: “Bob Scheiffer Defends Himself Against Fox News on New Black Panthers Story.”

See what I mean?

I missed CNN’s Reliable Sources over the weekend, mostly because I reached my yearly recommended dosage of Howie Kurtz somewhere back around mid-February, but apparently Scheiffer felt as if he needed to address accusations being hurled at him in the wake of a sit-down he did with Attorney General Eric Holder. At issue is the fact that at no point during that interview did he hammer Holder about a 2008 case in which a couple of members of the so-called New Black Panther Party, one carrying a nightstick, reportedly stood around a polling place in a predominantly black area of Philadelphia and eventually had to be escorted off the property by police. The DOJ went on to file a federal injunction against one of the two — the guy with the stick — but wound up dropping it because it determined that there wasn’t enough to the case to make it worth pursuing.

And that’s where things get sticky. And by sticky, I mean predictably dumb.

Conservative media, particularly Fox News, have finally picked up on the item and are trumpeting it as another example of President Obama’s Machiavellian hand silently pulling strings behind the scenes to protect those groups who might have helped steer votes in his direction during the 2008 race for the White House. If this sounds familiar, that’s because you’ve heard it before — back when it was known as “The ACORN Scandal.” If you can’t immediately see what the members of the New Black Panther Party and the people who were generally helped out by ACORN have in common, you need to have your eyes checked.

For the record, the New Black Panther Party is a fringe group that’s actually been denounced by the original Black Panthers. Its leader, the artist formerly known as Paris Lewis who now goes by the amusingly generic hyper-African moniker “Dr. Malik Zulu Shabazz,” is the kind of clownish caricature Fox News loves to trot out at regular intervals. This is because he’s guaranteed to say something mindlessly inflammatory that will scare the hell out of the network’s demographic of lily-white, middle-American doofs, confirming all their worst fears about the encroaching “Negro threat.” As former Washington Post columnist Dave Weigel beautifully put it, Shabazz is to Bill O’Reilly what the KKK or GG Allin was to Donahue: Somebody who makes for great TV and whom your core audience can feel comfortable disliking intensely.

If you haven’t been watching Fox News lately — and I can’t in good conscience suggest that you do — the Panthers “story” has been obsessively, breathlessly beaten into the ground by one network personality in particular: Megyn Kelly. She’s taken it upon herself, bless her little heart, to be the avatar for every freaked-the-fuck-out white Christian soul convinced that he or she is losing this great country to minorities or illegal immigrants or whatever, and that it all started with the election of the Great Kenyan Socialist Usurper. She’s like Elizabeth Hasselbeck with an actual associates degree and a shit-ton more professional ambition. Kelly is Fox’s rising star du jour, even going so far as to get an official canonization from none other than Sarah Palin via her overworked Twitter feed — and the reason for this is that she knows exactly when to crinkle her face into that lemon-sucking look of smug skepticism, and just what buttons to press and what open-ended questions to ask of her viewers.

And so she’s harped on the New Black Panthers meme with stalker-like intensity — and with the full understanding that it’s good for the network and therefore good for her career. Which is what caused her to “call out” Bob Scheiffer for supposedly shirking his journalistic duty by not asking the tough questions about the New Black Panthers bombshell when he had the chance.

Pay attention to enough partisan media these days — particularly on the conservative side, only because it has the largest megaphone in Fox News and the most impressive bullpen of bullies — and the patterns among the chaos really begin to stand out. As with ACORN, which was always a mostly bullshit story, the right created a controversy out of thin air, amplified and advanced that contrived controversy, and now is engaging in indignant political theater by pretending to give a damn that no one outside the echo chamber cares about the controversy it’s made deafening within the echo chamber. The problem, of course, is that thanks to its typical spinelessness in the face of any accusation of a liberal bias, the rest of the press is more than happy to let itself be suckered into the right’s vortex of largely fact-free crazy. The mainstream media allow themselves to be talked into seeing the same ghosts that Fox News is trying to scare the hell out of its audience with.

That’s what makes it so painful to watch Bob Scheiffer (a titan of the network news business whose reputation is just about bulletproof) feel like he has to answer to allegations made by Megyn Kelly (a yapping chihuahua who wouldn’t know journalism if it came in a bottle of peroxide).

The New Black Panthers Party “story” isn’t a story at all — certainly not as Fox News is selling it. It’s a Southern Strategy dog whistle designed to rile up more fear in an already angry and frightened white America. It’s one racist tool with a nightstick being used to confirm the inflexibly entrenched suspicions of a good number of other racist tools.

But as long as credible guys like Bob Scheiffer allow Fox News and Megyn Kelly to set the narrative — to browbeat them into submission, into having to defend their own news judgment — this kind of thing is going to happen again and again. Kelly isn’t pushing the Panthers meme because she believes its an important story; she’s doing it because she knows it’s exactly what her viewers want to hear, believe anyway, and will never be convinced otherwise of.

Which means that any attempt by the media to indulge it will not only play directly into Fox and Kelly’s hand, furthering each’s goal, it won’t win them one convert from the audience it’s unnecessarily attempting to defer to.

Read more: New Black Panther Party, Fox News, Megyn Kelly, Malik Zulu Shabazz, Megyn Kelly New Black Panthers, Media News

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Bill O’Reilly took on the media over its coverage of the New Black Panthers scandal Monday night on “The O’Reilly Factor.”

O’Reilly took on Howard Kurtz, who said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” Sunday that Fox News was “pushing” the story, and Bob Schieffer, who told Kurtz that he missed the story because he was on vacation. Schieffer also disputed O’Reilly’s claim that the media had ignored the scandal to protect President Obama, saying instead that there were questions over how significant the story is.

“There is a growing split about how the news is covered in this country,” O’Reilly said. “The old guard mainstream media makes decisions based upon ideology, race and elitism. The new media, of which Fox News is a part, covers what Americans believe is important to them. That’s why we are a dominant No. 1, and I submit we have far more influence than the network news does.”

O’Reilly — who asked if Schieffer was vacationing on Venus — added, “Believe me, President Obama, every senator, every congressperson know exactly what we are reporting here, even if Bob Schieffer does not. This indicates there is a changing of the guard as far as news flow is concerned in the USA. If you want to know what’s really happening in America, you have to come here because you will not get it in much of the mainstream media.”

WATCH:
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

O’Reilly continued to assert that Fox News does a better job than the “mainstream media” in the following segment, during which he hosted Bernie Goldberg.

Goldberg said that network news personalities like Schieffer, Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer “fancy themselves sophisticated and worldly, [but] they are the most provicinal people out there. They don’t know anythign if it’s not in their bible, the New York Times.”

“My contention…is that we report the news better, certainly than CNN which is going right down the drain, and the Washington Post, which misses story after story after story, seemingly because of ideological reasons,” O’Reilly said.

“Fox has become the mainstream in America,” Goldberg responded.

“Well, there’s a new sheriff in town and I’m going to have to arrest Howard Kurtz,” O’Reilly said.

WATCH:
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

Read more: New Black Panther Party, Bernie Goldberg, Howard Kurtz, Video, Fox News, Bob Schieffer, Fox News New Black Panthers, Bill O'Reilly, Media News

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CBS News’ Bob Schieffer defended himself against Fox News Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

Schieffer, who interviewed Attorney General Eric Holder last weekend on “Face the Nation,” came under fire from Fox News’ Megyn Kelly for not asking Holder about the New Black Panthers scandal that Kelly has spent so much air-time covering:

Attorney General Eric Holder sit downs with CBS’ “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer for a half hour, a one-on-one interview. And not one question about the now-infamous New Black Panther voter intimidation case….

I’m telling you one of two things happened. You tell me if I’m wrong. Number one, Schieffer doesn’t care about the story and just decided to punt on it, even though you can find facts about it on CBS.com. So, the Web site over there is doing its job, but Schieffer apparently isn’t interested in the story. Or, number two, the DOJ sent guidelines for this interview and told him you can’t ask about that.

Schieffer denied both of Kelly’s accusations, telling Howard Kurtz that he simply hadn’t heard of the story by the time he interviewed Holder.

“Frankly, had I known about that, I would have asked the question,” Schieffer said. “I was on vacation that week. This happened — apparently, it got very little publicity. And, you know, I just didn’t know about it. I mean, you know, God knows everything, but I’m not quite that good. Every once in a while, something will slip by me. And in this case, it just slipped by me. If I’d have known it, I would have asked about it.”

WATCH:

Responding specifically to Kelly’s implication that Schieffer and “Face the Nation” agreed not to ask Holder about the scandal, Schieffer said “that’s not true. We never ever make deals with anybody that’s on ‘Face the Nation.’”

Schieffer also disagreed with Bill O’Reilly, who said that the major broadcast network newscasts haven’t covered the New Black Panthers story because they are trying to protect President Obama.

“I think the reason that there hasn’t been much coverage on it is there is a question about how significant this really is,” Schieffer said. “I think it is — you know, the coverage or lack of coverage has to do with editors’ news judgment. It doesn’t have anything to do with protecting President Obama. And I mean, I think, frankly, that’s absurd on the face of it.”

Read more: New Black Panther Party, Fox News, Fox News New Black Panthers, Megyn Kelly, Bob Schieffer, Bob Schieffer Eric Holder, Media News

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