Accidental Bull’s-Eye

The exploit that launched Andrew Breitbart’s media career consisted of giving employees of the late, unlamented ACORN the opportunity to act stupidly. He then recorded and publicized their follies. His latest venture, which has made a minor Agriculture Department bureaucrat famous, was along the same lines. He posted a video of Shirley Sherrod addressing a gathering of the Georgia NAACP, in which she appeared to celebrate her own past acts of racism to an appreciative audience, and waited to see what the NAACP would say or do in response.

What he no doubt expected from the organization was a tortured rationalization in defense of the indefensible. What happened was more astonishing. Within hours, the NAACP denounced Miss Sherrod, and the Department of Agriculture, reportedly at the direct insistence of the White House, fired her. At that point, Merry Andrew probably shrugged his shoulders, chalked up the misfire, and muttered, “Well, they got it right for once.”

Then it turned out that they hadn’t. Miss Sherrod’s fellow progressives had hypovehiculated her without bothering to hear her side of the story or to listen to her words in context (which the NAACP’s leadership could have done readily, since the Georgia chapter had a tape of the whole speech). As we all know by now, this was one of those not-too-common cases in which “taken out of context” was a proper characterization. With the sentences before and after the snippet restored, it became obvious that Miss Sherrod had deplored her own past failure to recognize that blacks and whites can have common interests and called on her audience to overcome narrow racial prejudices.

One can’t help suspecting that whoever sent Andrew Breitbart the truncated video was playing the hoisting-by-his-own-petard game: Breitbart would publicize the clip, the NAACP would promptly “refudiate” him, and he would look as bad as, well, a member of Journolist. But instead of refutation and repudiation came an instant embrace. The Obama Administration and its political allies treated this self-identified right-wing prankster as an unimpeachable source.

Expecting to expose liberal racism, Mr. Breitbart instead unearthed a rich vein of irresponsibility, bad judgment and callousness. While the incident is minor in itself (though not so minor to the victim – she holds deplorable opinions on some matters but was entitled to fair play from the White House, the Secretary of Agriculture and a once-respected civil rights organization), it illuminates the sad fact that our executive branch is in the hands of quasi-thugs rather than garden variety left-of-center politicians. As a Chicagoan, I’m not too surprised. As the White House grows more alarmed about its party’s mid-term election prospects, no one else should be surprised if the thuggery escalates.

Addendum: Despite the fact that his prank performed a valuable public service, Andrew Breitbart deserves a scolding for his careless failure to check potentially injurious material before circulating it to the world. Conservative blogger Elizabeth Scalia expressed doubts about the clip’s completeness as soon as she saw it. Mr. Breitbart should have been at least as cautious. He was lucky this time. In the future, he should be careful, too. He also ought to reveal the source of the misleading video. Its editor, having perpetrated a defamatory hoax, has no right to anonymity.