The shame of right-wing "journalism"
Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson distort facts to smear liberals, and it works. What liberals should learn Video
By Joan Walsh
Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson
It pains me to pay attention to the work of the Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson’s vanity project, as Carlson vies to compete with Andrew Breitbart on the right-wing "investigative journalism" frontier. What Carlson’s "journalism" has in common with Breitbart’s (besides being ethics-free) is blowing up stories that purport to "expose" the left with what are supposed to be the left’s own words — except that later, it will turn out that "the left’s own words" will have been hyped, manipulated and selectively edited, and that the story was baloney.
Today a big Breitbart "scoop" blew up in his angry face, when it was shown that the Big Journalism proprietor selectively edited a clip of an African-American USDA official seeming to admit she treated a white farmer poorly out of her own racial bias. It turns out that Shirley Sherrod was actually telling the story to show how the issue of race often obscures the issue of class, and the fact that poor black farmers and poor white farmers had a lot in common (eventually, she helped and became close to the white farmer and his family) — but Breitbart left all of that out of the video (just as he selectively and unfairly edited his cartoonish ACORN tapes).
Unbelievably, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack fired Sherrod based on Breitbart’s creative editing, which left out Sherrod’s real point (and in fact, accused her of making the opposite point) and also made it seem as though she was talking about something she did while working for the USDA, when the experience in question took place 24 years ago, when she worked for a nonprofit. If Vilsack doesn’t hire Sherrod back, I will personally contribute to her legal fund.
The shame of right-wing "journalism" – Joan Walsh – Salon.com