Rewriting history on the death of Andrew Breitbart
This is the only page I have that talks about Andrew Breitbart, and it’s especially timely today. In their obituaries, the news media, blogs, and blog commenters are falling over themselves lying about the dead, and the most common lie is that he somehow mistakenly defamed Shirley Sherrod. He did not. He included the context about Shirley Sherrod’s realization of her mistake in his original video of her road to Damascus. The stated point of the video was how the audience reacted to her mistake before she said it was a mistake.
Even the staff writers at Fox News felt compelled to include the left’s spin on the Sherrod story1:
Breitbart became embroiled in a controversy of his own, though, for his reporting on a web video of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod. The edited video appeared to show Sherrod making a racist comment, but the full tape later put the remark in context and made clear that Sherrod was actually talking about bridging racial differences.
Certainly, the video edited by Breitbart showed Sherrod making a racist comment: that was her point in telling the story. The lie here is that “the full tape later put the remark in context”. The original video that Breitbart posted put the remark in context. This is a lie, it’s smoke and mirrors, to divert attention away from Breitbart’s bullseye: that the audience approved of her racism.
And you have commenters blaring it from liberal blogs and sneaking into conservative blogs trying to push the lie. I’ve seen it on Ace of Spades HQ and on Legal Insurrection.
Everybody makes mistakes; I’m sure Breitbart made some too. The Sherrod story wasn’t one of them.
In response to Shirley Sherrod’s Damascus moment: The White House and the biased media need their own Damascus moment to parallel Shirley Sherrod’s.
That particular text may well have come from the Associated Press, which “contributed to this report.” But anyone with any familiarity with the controversy should have caught that lie.
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- Breitbart’s CPAC Speech: Ace at Ace of Spades HQ
- “I was just making the point on Twitter that even in death, especially in death, the left makes Andrew Breitbart’s case for him. They never seemed to understand that while the right is his audience, the left itself is his most potent ally—they prove everything he says with each hateful remark, each ‘ur a fag why don’t you get AIDS and die’ tweet.”
- Conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart is dead at 43 Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/
- “Breitbart considered his charge to expose corruption, hypocrisy and media bias, and leveraged his network of websites to reach for that goal.” (Memeorandum thread)
- A personal note on the death of Andrew Breitbart: William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection
- “Andrew is irreplaceable, but we would serve his memory well to aspire to more freedom of thought and more freedom of action.”
- Repeat after me: The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading: William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection
- “Each of the elements of Sherrod’s story which legend has it was not on the ‘edited’ tape in fact was on the tape. Read the post for the full sequence, but here are some images which demonstrate that the full scope of Sherrod’s story was in the ‘edited’ tape.”
More Andrew Breitbart
- Shirley Sherrod’s Damascus moment
- The White House and the biased media need their own Damascus moment to parallel Shirley Sherrod’s.
Update: William Jacobsen has added more details at Legal Insurrection.