Sinner: David Carr, for another woefully inadequate piece about Andrew Breitbart in today’s New York Times, whose problems begin with its headline: “Journalists, Provocateurs, Maybe Both”

    By no reasonable definition does a man who repeatedly posts deceptively edited videos qualify as a “journalist.”  And to quote Breitbart saying he is “merely bringing some honesty to how journalism is prosecuted in a modern age” is like quoting Mark McGwire, if he had bragged that he had only used “the best tools that modern science can provide” to improve his baseball playing.

    Instead of characterizing Brietbart as the dishonest propaganda provider that he is, Carr offered him his own choice of monikers: “journalist, provocateur, advocate.” (Breitbart chose all three.)

   And for the umpteenth time a Times reporter identifies Breitbart as the man who “famously brought Acorn to its knees by releasing heavily edited video clips that suggested the poverty organization had provided advice to a conservative activist posing as a pimp”–without bothering to mention any of the multiple investigations which describe in detail all of the huge distortions produced by that “heavy editing”–including the false impression that James E. O’Keefe III visited ACORN offices in the outlandish outfit of a pimp.

    According to its own correction,the Times managed to leave that false impression in three separate articles on September 16, 2009 and September 19, 2009,  and  Jan 31, 2010–most egregiously, in Scott Shane’s humiliating  wet-kiss profile of O’Keefe, in which he described O’Keefe’s work as “Candid Camera for the Internet age, a lethally effective political tool that Mr. O’Keefe has helped pioneer between college and graduate-school studies.”

   Last spring, Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that the Acorn/O’Keefe story "became something of an orphan at the paper. At least 14 reporters, reporting to different sets of editors, have touched it since last fall. Nobody owns it.  Bill Keller, the executive editor, said that, 'sensing the story would not go away and would be part of a larger narrative,' the paper should have assigned one reporter to be responsible for it."

   Update: This is reminiscent of Keller’s description of his lackadaisical attitude toward Judy Miller.  In its own retrospective on the Miller disaster, The Times reported, “after questions were raised about the reliability of her reporting about Iraq. Mr. Keller told Ms. Miller that she could no longer cover Iraq and weapons issues. Even so, Mr. Keller said, ‘she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.’”

Note to Bill: assigning one competent reporter to keep up with Breitbart's exploits might also be a really good idea.

    Like so many other articles in the MSM, today’s piece by Carr implies some kind of equivalency between Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow (“There have been times when it seemed that Rush Limbaugh was acting as de facto head of the Republican Party, as the Democrats picked up talking points from Rachel Maddow”) and Maddow and Glenn Beck (PolitiFact.com “truth-squads talking heads from Glenn Beck to Ms. Maddow.”)

    Which overlooks the fact that Rachel Maddow’s opinions are based on serious reporting, while Limbaugh’s and Beck’s are usually paranoid fantasies based on nothing but their unchanging prejudices.  Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann actually care whether something they say is true; Rush  Limbaugh and Glenn Beck do not. 

   Question: Why is someone like Carr unwilling to make that simple fact clear to his readers? 

   Answer:  Almost every MSM reporter lives in mortal fear of being branded a "liberal" by Fox--and Carr is no exception.

    As former New York Times managing editor Arthur Gelb observed to FCP, "the established press's treatment of Beck is not much different from the gingerly way the press at first treated Joe McCarthy -- until at long last it managed to find  the guts to wake up (even Murrow's attack was too late!!). " 

   Gelb deals with this subject in some detail in his fine memoir of his life at the Times, City Room.

Sinner: Brian Stelter, previously co-author of a deeply-flawed page one profile of Glenn Beck in the Times, described by FCP yesterday, who today advances the debate about Brietbart by reporting that this serial prevaricator  “knows who the true race-baiters are: some Democratic activists.” 

    This is not substantially different from straight-facedly quoting a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan on the origins of racism in America.  And, just like Carr, Stelter refers to “heavily edited tapes that appeared to show counselors at the liberal community organizing group Acorn giving advice to an ostensible pimp and his prostitute about evading taxes and setting up a brothel” without giving a hint of exactly how many lies those “heavy edits” produced. 

   Stelter also reports that Fox did not cover the Sherrod video on Monday, although “Bill O’Reilly did call on her to resign;" that O’Reilly “apologized two nights later;” and that Shepard Smith asked “What in the world has happened to our industry and the White House?”  

   If you watched Rachel Maddow last Wednesday, you would know how Fox really covered this story: wall-to-wall character assassination of Shirley Sherrod all day Tuesday, followed by shock–shock!–that the White House had jumped to the conclusion that she had done anything wrong.

Winner: Mitch Albom of The Free Press  whose column  should be studied by Carr and Stelter to remind them of all the basics of Journalism 101, which they seem to have forgotten.  Albom recalls Breitbart’s description of Teddy Kennedy a few hours after his death: “a special pile of human excrement”–which once upon a time, long, long ago, would have disqualified him from being credulously quoted in any serious newspaper again.

    Albom quotes Brietbart describing himself as “public enemy 1 or 2 to the Democratic party...based upon the successes my journalism has had.”

    Then the columnist does the basic deconstruction which any competent journalist would automatically perform:
     There are several things wrong with that statement.  First, I doubt he counts that much.
     Second, his journalism? It's not journalism if you look for only one point of view, post other people's stuff and don't even acknowledge how using chopped-up material to paint a full picture is wrong.

     "Let me think about that," was what Breitbart said, when asked whether he might have vetted the footage more carefully if given another chance.

     Let me think about that?

Winner: James Rainey, of The Los Angeles Times, who describes
how enraged Breitbart became when Rainey demanded last year that  he release the unedited ACORN tapes.  (Question: did anyone at The New York Times ever make that request?) 

    Then Rainey  makes this simple but crucial observation: “Many news outlets reported on the controversy and the video, most jumping in after Sherrod had resigned. But it was the select few — led by conservative bloggers and some segments of the Fox News empire — that embraced the attack from the start.”

    And while a Fox news executive successfully spun Howard Kurtz by leaking him an e-mail urging caution in reporting on the Sherrod story, Rainey points out that hours after that e-mail was sent Monday afternoon, FoxNation.com’s headline read:  "Caught on Tape: Obama Official Discriminates Against White Farmer."

Winner: The indispensable E.J. Dionne, who gets right to the heart of the matter:

    The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a "teachable moment." It is a time for action.

    The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

    The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

Read the rest of E.J.'s fine column here.

                                                    -30-