The brouhaha involving the firing of an employee of the Agriculture Department last week for alleged racist remarks in a speech made 24 years ago — followed by swift apologies from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and President Barack Obama when they learned that the speech in question had advocated racial reconciliation, not racism — was instructive on a couple of fronts.
Foremost, it shows just how easily politicians can become spooked these days by a pervasive and voracious news media and blogosphere into hastily over-reacting to a situation. As well, it illustrates how outdated the old-fashioned advice to think before you act and look before you leap has become.
The Agriculture Department dust-up began when Shirley Sherrod, who is black, was forced to resign as Georgia’s director of rural development. Her resignation came after a conservative blogger posted a portion of a video of her telling a crowd at a local meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People about her initial reluctance 24 years ago to help a poor white farmer seeking government assistance. Sherrod said she used the story in her speech to the NAACP to promote racial reconciliation, but the edited video distorted her remarks. The farmer in question confirmed that Sherrod eventually helped him save his farm.
According to The Associated Press, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart said he had posted some of Sherrod’s remarks in an attempt to illustrate that racism exists in the NAACP, an argument he was using to counter allegations by the civil rights organization of racism in the Tea Party movement.
After her firing, Sherrod told news reporters that a department official had demanded her immediate resignation in part because the story was allegedly going to run on the conservative Fox Network’s Glenn Beck show that evening. The implication was that the Obama administration wanted desperately to preempt any histrionics that Beck — long a harsh critic of Obama — might have had planned concerning the video posting.
But to the surprise of many, Beck did not air the story on that day’s 5 p.m. show. When he ran the video the following day, his position was that Sherrod appeared to have been treated unfairly — her remarks taken out of context and her firing coming at the hands of skittish bosses who acted without having properly investigated the matter.
Obama, who had stayed out of the fracas until his apology three days after Sherrod’s firing, acknowledged that Vilsack had been too quick to seek Sherrod’s dismissal. “He jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles,” Obama told reporters after his apology to Sherrod. He said he had instructed “my team” to make sure “that we are focusing on doing the right thing, instead of what looks to be politically necessary at that very moment.”
In the current issue of American Journalism Review magazine, editor Rem Rieder has a pretty good analysis of how the administration’s public relations nightmare occurred. “The toxic combination of the 24-hour news cycle, the ugly political climate, the partisan blogosphere, the hyperactive cable news channels and the quest for instant damage control made the Shirley Sherrod debacle inevitable,” Rieder said. Predictably, when a story breaks, “the blogs whip it into a frenzy and cable does its saturation thing.”
Alluding to the questioning of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s credibility and patriotism by his opponents during the 2004 election, Rieder writes, “In this case the Obamaites, memories of death by swiftboating vivid in their memories, moved to make all the noise go away as quickly as possible — so quickly that they ordered up a bus to throw Sherrod under without checking the facts.” Vilsack fired Sherrod before any feared “media cataclysm” had a chance to develop, he points out. “The dog hadn’t barked.”
For all parties concerned, this could be one of those teachable moments that Obama loves to talk about — a reminder, as Rieder suggests, “to slow down, to check things out, to get the full story before posting or publishing or acting.”
Sound advice. But in today’s ill-mannered and fast-paced rat race we probably shouldn’t go betting the farm that things will change much.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.