It's Time to Inoculate Ourselves Against Slander and Falsehoods in the Media

Last September, Fox News embraced a series of videos released by Andrew Breitbart that purported to expose ACORN, the national grassroots advocacy group, as fraudulently seeking governmental services for folks disguised as pimps and prostitutes. The ensuing rapid fire media reaction and the political firestorm it created drove ACORN to its knees, and it was quickly abandoned by its progressive allies, funders and supporters. All of this occurred long before the context and facts were investigated or evaluated, and the video "stings" were exposed as having been edited to misrepresent the alleged "facts" by both our independent report, "An Independent Governance Assessment of ACORN: A Path to Meaningful Reform", and the Public Editor's March 21, 2010 column in the New York Times.

The Shirley Sherrod incident that has played out in prime time this week has had all of the same elements and ingredients. The same conservative blogger -- Breitbart; the same network -- Fox News; the same kind of edited video -- again involving race. This apparently proved that the Department of Agriculture was engaged in illegal, fraudulent activities that were known and supported by NAACP and democratic and progressive leaders, including the Obama administration. This time, though, it backfired -- because the "victim" struck back immediately with the full facts, and the mainstream media gave equal time to her side of the story. As a result, the Obama administration and other democrats and progressives were forced to reverse their actions and rhetoric -- and admit that they had reacted to the first sign of political and media pressure without doing their own independent fact-checking!

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