For Breitbart: things fall apart …
Andrew Breitbart launched BigGovernment and BigHollywood.com to try and force the mainstream media to cover stories conservatives care about. He’s had some high profile successes, even taking down ACORN (they were cleared of all wrongdoing, but only after being stripped of their federal funding.) Now, after his big Shirley Sherrod flameout, will any credible media outlet ever take Andrew Breitbart seriously again? (Should they ever have?) With a potential lawsuit on his hands, and as even some conservatives turning on him, Breitbart is about to become an even angrier, fringier man.
Breitbart is still insisting — someone desperately — that he never meant to “target” Shirley Sherrod, and that his only intention in posting edited clips from her speech was to get back at the NAACP on behalf of the tea parties. Too bad nobody believes him, except of course for the Axis of Beck and Limbaugh, who have now stooped to claiming that Breitbart was “entrapped” by the White House.
Breitbart’s shoddy “journalism,” his failure to seek a comment from Sherrod or the NAACP before posting the clips, his even more basic failure to request and view the entire 40-minute speech before posting sections of it out of context, are drawing scathing denunciations from actual members of the media, including from some on the right (emphasis on “some…”)
Perhaps most importantly, the criticism of Breitbart is infecting not just him, but also his chief patron Fox News, which routinely picks up Breitbart’s BigGovernment dreck and runs it in a continual loop for their right wing viewers. From Media Matters:
Daniel Okrent, who served as the first public editor for The New York Times and is a respected author, said failing to contact Sherrod for comment was a major error. “You always have to give people a chance to comment,” he said. “If you are representing yourself as a news organization, you have to give people the right to respond.”
He also added, “Taking things out of context happens every day. One of the things you do to protect yourself is to check with the person involved.”
NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard agreed: “Any journalist would seek comment. If Breitbart does not, he is not a journalist.” She also added, “Fox has just as much of an obligation as any news organization to look at the video and check the facts.”
Fred Brown, a Denver Post columnist and journalism professor at the University of Denver, said the video clip should have sparked some skepticism in both Breitbart and Fox. “What you have to be most skeptical about is your own skepticism,” said Brown, also an SPJ ethics committee member. “They should have listened to the whole tape. They posted it with something in mind and decided they did not want to show it in context. That is at least sloppy.”
Brown said BigGovernment.com, as a blog, is not excused from being inaccurate. “A blog can get away with being partisan, but you can’t be inaccurate,” he explained, adding “Fox should be held to a higher standard. They ought to tell the whole story.”
Tom Fiedler, Dean of the College of Communication at Boston University, said both news outlets broke two basic tenats of journalism: “One involves having your information correct. The other is giving someone a chance to comment.”
Media Matters also chronicles Fox News’ history of teaming up with Breitbart. Watch:
Breitbart being Breitbart — a practitioner of white victimization of the first order — he is responding to the criticism by whining, and calling himself “public enemy number one.” And he does have his defenders, but they tend to be of the reprobate, demented right wing category — case in point; the odious Dan Riehl.
But going forward, I suspect that no media outlet outside of Fox News, and not even everyone on Fox, is going to be running with any Breitbart “scoops” any time soon. BigGovernment just became WorldNetDaily.
Oh, and about that lawsuit? A legal expert says Fox News could wind up as a defendant, too.
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[...] story in a nutshell: Andrew Breitbart, a right-winger hardcase and Tea Party pusher-man, posted a short video on his jaundiced, nasty, [...]