{"id":89785,"date":"2010-07-26T00:00:01","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T05:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2010\/07\/26\/shirley-sherrod-page\/"},"modified":"2024-04-14T04:16:16","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T09:16:16","slug":"shirley-sherrod-page","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/journalism\/2010\/07\/26\/shirley-sherrod-page\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reconstruction of a Media Mess"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Look at How One Video Triggered a Rush to Judgment<\/h2>\n\n

At one point during the furor over Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department staffer forced to resign after a video was posted on a conservative website, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the incident was a \u201cteachable moment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

The episode may or may not serve to foster a broader national discussion on race. But it did open a window on how information and misinformation can careen through the current media ecosystem.\u00a0 Increasingly, supersonic speed predominates and reaction time shrinks. Online posts come in the middle of the night. Commentary and punditry add velocity to stories even before news reports have sorted them out. Partisan players are increasingly becoming news distributors with ties to cable channels and bloggers who follow them closely.<\/p>\n\n

The case also illustrates how in this current media culture, someone can go from obscurity to household name status, and from ostracized to lionized, in a matter of 48 hours. In all, the Sherrod story was the second-biggest topic in the mainstream press last week.<\/p>\n\n

The Sherrod saga began on the morning of July 19 when the conservative website Big Government posted an excerpt of a speech that appeared to show the African-American woman admitting to an NACCP audience she did not do her best to help a white farmer in trouble. The broader backdrop was that the NAACP had recently issued a statement asking the tea party to repudiate the racists in its midst. The proprietor of Big Government, Andrew Breitbart, publicized a video that he said showed that the NAACP itself was racist.<\/p>\n\n

Within hours, the video was picked up in the blogosphere, the administration forced Sherrod to resign and it became a cable talk topic (particularly on Fox).\nThe narrative abruptly changed the morning of July 20 when Sherrod told her side of the story. Then the full video showed her using the farmer story as an example of how she moved beyond racial issues to help save his farm. Events moved quickly after that. The NAACP, which initially condemned Sherrod\u2019s remarks, declared that it had been fooled by a hoax. On July 21, both Gibbs and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized to Sherrod, who was asked to continue working in the department. And on July 22, Obama spoke to her by phone.<\/p>\n\n

Toward the end of the week, the story began morphing into a broader analysis of race in America, the behavior of the media and the apportioning of blame among parties ranging from the Obama administration to the Fox News Channel.<\/p>\n\n

The chronology that follows traces how the story evolved and played out in the media in that frantic period between the July 19 release of the video and the July 21 apologies to Sherrod from Gibbs and Vilsack as well as Fox News host Bill O\u2019Reilly. It does not purport to capture every item or account of the Sherrod story, but it does outline the arc of how and how quickly the story moved.<\/p>\n\n

Ironically, one message that emerges from the debris of the Sherrod episode is something Breitbart wrote as the first words in the post containing his now controversial video excerpt:<\/p>\n\n

\u201cContext is everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

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Chronology\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n

Monday July 19 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n