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Merged Andrew Breitbart has died

Kaus versus Gerson

mhaze,

I don't buy Mickey Kaus's defense of Mr. Breitbart's conduct in the Shirley Sherrod affair. Mr. Breitbart might have checked into the video more carefully to see whether it had been edited. More importantly, he might have asked her to tell her side of the story, yet I can find no indication that he did so (points that I have made before). IMO a failure to contact her was a sin of omission on Mr. Breitbart's part. As Michael Gerson pointed out with respect to James O'Keefe, "This [a citizen journalist] can be defined as someone who simultaneously demands journalistic respect and release from journalistic standards, including a commitment to honesty. The profession of journalism counts many biases, challenges and failures. But citizen journalism has a problem of its own."
 
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mhaze,

I don't buy Mickey Kaus's defense of Mr. Breitbart's conduct in the Shirley Sherrod affair. Mr. Breitbart might have checked into the video more carefully to see whether it had been edited. More importantly, he might have asked her to tell her side of the story, yet I can find no indication that he did so (points that I have made before). IMO a failure to contact her was a sin of omission on Mr. Breitbart's part. ....
I see that issue pretty much as Zig mentioned, that it was an indictment more of NAACP, than of Sherrod. I've watched the video and seen the issues on that and how they developed.

Regarding should he have contacted her, beats me. I'm not sure she would have been allowed...in her position...to talk to him. Should anyone in the government be allowed to talk to reporters?
 
I see that issue pretty much as Zig mentioned, that it was an indictment more of NAACP, than of Sherrod. I've watched the video and seen the issues on that and how they developed.

Regarding should he have contacted her, beats me. I'm not sure she would have been allowed...in her position...to talk to him. Should anyone in the government be allowed to talk to reporters?

Okay, let's try this again...

BREITBART SHOULD HAVE MADE THE ATTEMPT AND PUT IT INTO THE RECORD THAT HE DID SO!

Sherrod was making a SPEECH! This meant there was more to what she had to say than the very roughly five or six minutes of said address that Breitbart excerpted and blew out of proportion!

I'm willing to bet that Sherrod would not only have been willing to talk to him, but that had he listened, Breitbart might have found an ally for much of what he claimed he supported.

Can I spell it out for you any clearer?
 
Okay, let's try this again...

BREITBART SHOULD HAVE MADE THE ATTEMPT AND PUT IT INTO THE RECORD THAT HE DID SO!

Sherrod was making a SPEECH! This meant there was more to what she had to say than the very roughly five or six minutes of said address that Breitbart excerpted and blew out of proportion!

I'm willing to bet that Sherrod would not only have been willing to talk to him, but that had he listened, Breitbart might have found an ally for much of what he claimed he supported.

Can I spell it out for you any clearer?
^^ This. Why is this being debated? He harmed someone. Why are people defending that?

FWIW: Journalists have a professional obligation to try and get a comment from those whom they could harm with their reporting. If you don't, AIU, it increases the reporters exposure to an accusation of malice.
 
^^ This. Why is this being debated? He harmed someone. Why are people defending that?

Because Breitbart was smearing people that these people do not like. That puts what beyond their criticism.

FWIW: Journalists have a professional obligation to try and get a comment from those whom they could harm with their reporting. If you don't, AIU, it increases the reporters exposure to an accusation of malice.

Breitbart was a journalist? Next you´ll be calling Comical Ali a newscaster, I guess?
 
Okay, let's try this again...

BREITBART SHOULD HAVE MADE THE ATTEMPT AND PUT IT INTO THE RECORD THAT HE DID SO!

Sherrod was making a SPEECH! This meant there was more to what she had to say than the very roughly five or six minutes of said address that Breitbart excerpted and blew out of proportion!

I'm willing to bet that Sherrod would not only have been willing to talk to him, but that had he listened, Breitbart might have found an ally for much of what he claimed he supported.

Can I spell it out for you any clearer?
I've listened to the whole speech. Basically what I conclude from it is that if someone stands up and says racist things (their preferred kind of racist things) in front of the NAACP, they cheer you on. Brietbart did not call for her resignation (Bill Oreilly did, and he was pretty quick to apologize).

Brietbart said this:

This was not about Shirley Sherrod. It's about the NAACP. This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party and this [the video of Ms. Sherrod] is showing racism at an NAACP event. I did not ask for Shirley Sherrod to be fired. I did not ask for any repercussions for Shirley Sherrod. They were the ones that took the initiative to get rid of her.​

And Brietbart said this:

Apologize for WHAT?​

If you want to find some way to find fault with Brietbart in this instance, you can do so. He should have done this, he should have done that, ad nausium. It wasn't Brietbart that threw Sherrod under the bus.

Oh, and let me know the next time Media Matters, Think Progress, the Young Turks, Desmogblog, or any of a number of other lefist smear merchants go around asking those they attack for their story.
 
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I've listened to the whole speech. Basically what I conclude from it is that if someone stands up and says racist things (their preferred kind of racist things) in front of the NAACP, they cheer you on.
No.
 
Oh, one other thing about the Sherrod smashup. I'm okay with the eventual outcome of the case. Sherrod is fired, offered the job back, declines, and gets a better job. Naacp look like idiots. White House look like idiots. Brietbart released the story, good for him. Sherrod sued Brietbart, that's anybody's right if they have standing and the rudiments of a case.
 
Oh, one other thing about the Sherrod smashup. I'm okay with the eventual outcome of the case. Sherrod is fired, offered the job back, declines, and gets a better job. Naacp look like idiots. White House look like idiots. Brietbart released the story, good for him.
The sick bastard deserves no praise for making his betters look like crooks and dastards by lying about them.

Sherrod sued Brietbart, that's anybody's right if they have standing and the rudiments of a case.

We have clear malice on sludge monster's part. We have emotional distress on Sherrod's part.

There is a tort and the sludge monster had no defense and he knew it. His having said that he had reason to believe he is right is not a defense. He was a known pathological liar.
 
I've listened to the whole speech. Basically what I conclude from it is that if someone stands up and says racist things (their preferred kind of racist things) in front of the NAACP, they cheer you on.

If that's your conclusion, then you clearly have no interest in the evidence, which clearly shows the audience sitting quietly as Sherrod described her initial refusal to offer direct help, and then agreeing when she saw the lawyer she sent him to refusing to help, and decided to aid him directly. A full analysis is right here. Breitbart's claim that the audience was "laughing and applauding" was a lie.

Brietbart did not call for her resignation (Bill Oreilly did, and he was pretty quick to apologize).

And again, that's the point. He defamed her as a way to also defame the NAACP, because the NAACP had asked the Tea Party groups to toss the people in their rallies that were writing plainly racist screeds or waving plainly racist signs.

What's interesting is that, despite Operation Wall Street did take steps when they discovered sexual predators in their rallies, Breitbart still saw fit to screech "Stop Raping People" at an OWS-related group. By his own standards, the Tea Parties are all malignant racists. So he was also a plain hypocrite.
 
And again, that's the point. He defamed her as a way to also defame the NAACP, because the NAACP had asked the Tea Party groups to toss the people in their rallies that were writing plainly racist screeds or waving plainly racist signs.

What's interesting is that, despite Operation Wall Street did take steps when they discovered sexual predators in their rallies, Breitbart still saw fit to screech "Stop Raping People" at an OWS-related group. By his own standards, the Tea Parties are all malignant racists. So he was also a plain hypocrite.

Hey, at least OWS was trying to get sexual predators removed. I might have had some semblance of support for the TP if they'd done the same with the racists.

(This means you, Mark Williams. And YOU DAMNED WELL KNEW BETTER!)
 
If that's your conclusion, then you clearly have no interest in the evidence <<<blah blah blah>>.
The way I see it, the NAACP had been bullying and misrepresenting various things for a long time, and nobody called them when they stepped over the line.

Well, with Brietbart they just ran smack dab into someone that pushed back twice as hard.

That's essentially what was going on. It makes total sense that you would not like that, if you were the side that was getting twice as much as you'd been dishing out without any objections for decades.

The message of Brietbart is that those times are over. Bitch if you want to, whine all you want. That'd be okay with him.
 
Hey, at least OWS was trying to get sexual predators removed. I might have had some semblance of support for the TP if they'd done the same with the racists.

(This means you, Mark Williams. And YOU DAMNED WELL KNEW BETTER!)
Road, you've matched one gross generalization with a sweeping generalization. I'm not sure anyone can actually conclude anything from that. With two decentralized and discordant groups, to boot. But it's the nature of the human mind to compulsively make order out of chaos, often, whether accurately or not is less important than conceptualizing the order, and often, I suspect there is actually nothing but chaos.

I'll tell you this, though.

I was in DC on a business convention 5-20-2009, when there was some huge Tea Party thing around the Capitol.

There wasn't one speck of trash anywhere after they left.
 
There wasn't one speck of trash anywhere after they left.
Of course not. They save it to dump on rallies and town halls of peole they oppose. They also inflitrate the areas in which opponents are operating with thugs to commit acts of violence.
 

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