CSotD: Trolling for suckers
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Ed Stein is a well-respected veteran of the brutal circulation wars in Denver*, and, if his former home base at the Rocky Mountain News no longer exists, his wit and insight remain unimpaired, to the extent that I'm going to let him run his own commentary on this cartoon:
Conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart did it again, quite
spectacularly this time. His first memorable foray into the slime was
his destruction of ACORN with misleading videos edited to make it look
as though the umbrella organization of community organizations, which
primarily helped the poor and disadvantaged, was corrupt. His attempt at
smearing civil rights hero John Lewis with preposterously edited videos
was so outrageous even Fox News wouldn’t run them. His deliberately
distorted videos of Shirley Sherrod’s speech initially appeared to be so
damning that the NAACP, the White House and the Dept. of Agriculture
(her employer) panicked and ran for the hills before the truth emerged.
Breitbart claims that he simply ran the video and had no part in editing
it, but given his history of deliberate distortions, it’s hard to
believe him.
Even if he’s telling the truth, he didn’t bother to check the story.
In that, he’s not alone. Fox News played the video without any qualms
(hardly a surprise). The NAACP, which should have known better, rushed
to denounce Ms. Sherrod, and her boss at Agriculture summarily fired
her, with the approval of the White House, before doing even the
slightest fact checking.
The far right understands all too well how easy it is to whip up
white resentment with a black man in the oval office, and shamelessly
looks for ways to fan those flames. It’s sad and despicable, but we
should be used to that by now. What’s almost as sad is how easy it was
to spook the folks who should be standing firm against such disgusting
behavior, and how badly they reacted.
Given the events of the past week, we can look for the Breitbarts of
the world to continue their high-tech lynchings. So much for post-racial
America.
*Editor's note: I had the dubious privilege of watching that fight from a ringside seat in which my well-informed interpretations of the action came from a marketing and circulation perspective, augmented by my own insights as a former business and consumer reporter now working on the money side of the wall. Those of us who know how newspaper revenues actually work are generally contemptuous of the ivory tower newsroom types and their fanciful notions of what is going on in the industry. In this singular and horrific case, however, nothing they imagine could have been worse than the truth. I'm delighted that Ed has survived the apocalypse and is still out there afflicting the comfortable.
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