By John Brummett

The Shirley Sherrod affair illustrates only three of the main problems with modern American media and politics.

First it demonstrates — hardly for the first time — that there no longer exists any meaningful divide between the irresponsibility of partisan bloggers and the supposed news professionalism of the mainstream media.

By mainstream media, I primarily refer in this case to the cable news networks, mainly the most disgraceful one.

These cable news networks must fill time perpetually, around the clock, every day. If, then, they come into something that is digitally ready, and if it is incendiary, and if it advances the network’s political agenda, then it gets broadcast, even if it amounts to pure bogus slime.

Partisans with a laptop have learned how to feed the hungry cable news monster. The ones on the right are better at it, or at least more widely viewed.

So what you’re getting from cable news isn’t always so much news as some zealot’s manifesto.

In this particular matter, a right-wing guy with a blog and an extreme partisan agenda somehow came into receipt of a video of Sherrod, director of rural development for the USDA in Georgia, as she gave a recent speech to an NAACP gathering in Georgia.

Sherrod says in this video that that she was disinclined two decades before, on account of race, to help a white farmer.

Then Fox News, which exists to feed the right-wing mania and destroy the Obama administration, ran the video over and over and over again.

Then practically everyone else in the media felt obliged to report on this supposed issue.

That brings us to the second problem. It is that the affair epitomizes the shadow-fleeing cowardice of Democrats who act as if they’re in office only by fluke and had best not reveal their true selves if they want to have any chance of surviving the next election.

In this case I refer mainly, but not entirely, to Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who is Obama’s agriculture secretary.

The third problem, a refinement of the second, is the more specific hypersensitivity of a certain key Democrat, that being President Obama.

His White House spends entirely too much time over-reacting to right-wing critics and undercutting its honest positions by making them seem unworthy of proud, direct and forthright defense.

Obama behaves as if he is in danger of having Fox viewers find out that he has some liberalism in him and may actually be a black person.

For fear of Fox, Vilsack abruptly fired Sherrod for her supposed outrageous reverse discrimination.

For fear of Fox, Obama’s White House wanted Vilsack to fire Sherrod and patted itself on the back for its quick reaction to head off this problem.

So now you know what happened.

Further checking discovered a video of the full speech. It turned out that Sherrod was merely talking about how our race-based instincts can be wrong and must be overcome.

She talked later in that very speech of helping this very white farmer. This very white farmer gave an interview in which he said Sherrod had done nothing less than save his 500-acre farm.

Those are the kinds of things journalists could and should have looked into beforehand. They are the kinds of things an agriculture secretary and a White House, especially a White House, with all its resources, could and should have looked into before executing a high-profile firing.

Within 24 hours of sacrificing this woman, the White House was apologizing to her and Vilsack was offering her another job. And, of course, Vilsack was trying to absorb all the blame himself so that his boss the president could be spared any responsibility or damage.

Here’s what the Obama administration needs to do, from the White House down to the tiniest agency: Turn off Fox. Keep Fox off. Tell Fox where to go. Confront its shadow. Get some gumption.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.