Unchecked video sets off a media storm

This is the story of the three-minute video that lied - and how, in our supercharged media world, a tiny clip can ignite a runaway chain reaction.

And it's the story of Shirley Sherrod, who until Tuesday worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture - and who, by the time you read this, may be working there again.

It began Monday, when the clip, from a 43-minute speech Sherrod gave in March to an NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia, appeared on the conservative website Breitbart.com. In a blog post, activist Andrew Breitbart called it a "racist" tale in which she "racially discriminates against a white farmer." Breitbart, long at odds with the NAACP, said this demonstrated its racism. The NAACP had passed a resolution at its national conference last week calling on the tea party movement to repudiate racist elements in its ranks.

Out of an already-buzzing blogosphere, the clip was sucked into the 24/7 news cycle. Many major cable news outlets ran it, evidently without watching the rest of the speech.

Lambasted by NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, Sherrod resigned, saying later she'd been pressured to by an administration official worried that the story was going to be on Glenn Beck's show on Fox. Her boss, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, declared "zero tolerance for discrimination."

Then . . . somebody looked at the whole speech. Turns out it wasn't what it seemed. Quite the reverse.

"This shows you do your work, better check your facts, or you'll end up doing something you're going to regret," says Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Public Policy.

As of last night, Vilsack had apologized, the White House had apologized, and Sherrod had been offered a new job (she was considering it). While the NAACP, the Obama administration, and many in the 24/7 news media have been left looking, well, dumb.

Had people watched, they'd have seen Sherrod giving old-fashioned testimony about herself. To an audience nodding in the rhythm of religious call-and-response, she told of a 1986 case when she worked for a nonprofit that helped farmers. She related how she initially hesitated to assist white farmers Roger and Eloise Spooner. But Sherrod finally saw her error and did all she could to help them avoid foreclosure on their farm.

Sherrod said she felt that God had sent her this case to teach her. The Spooners said Tuesday on CNN's Rick's List that they considered Sherrod a friend and "no way" a racist.

Initially, no one looked at the whole speech. Except, again, the bloggers. Conservative bloggers were among the first to question the edit. On the blog Anchoress, self-described "uneasy" blogger Elizabeth Scalia wrote Monday that "it seemed like Sherrod was heading somewhere with that story, and the edit does not let us get there. I want the rest of the story before I start passing judgment on it. . . . I want to see the rest of the tape."

As author and political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson ironically observes: "The blogosphere was even first to question the tape. Bloggers and Internet folk and Twitterers are way ahead. They get info out there and move it much faster than the larger, electronic media." MSNBC's Chris Licht was among the first mainstream reporters to watch the whole speech. And from there, the little clip's narrative collapsed.

But the damage had been done, gaffes made, egg ladled on all faces. "It shows the power of the media to imprint a false idea, and everyone runs with it without corroboration," says Hutchinson.

"I think everybody has to go back," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday, "and look at what has happened over the past 24 to 36 hours, and ask ourselves how we got into this. How did we not ask the right questions? How did you all [the media] not ask the right questions? How did other people not ask the right questions?"

How indeed? How and why did this happen? It happened when Breitbart received the clip from another source and posted it, then wrote a blog entry saying it was racist.

But why were so many people so lax in checking it?

Jackson of FactCheck.org sees three things at play.

First is the voracious 24/7 news cycle. "Clearly, this could never have happened before competing 24-hour cable-talk networks," Jackson says. "It's all talk, all the time. People need something to talk about, and unfortunately, many of the personalities on these networks don't care all that much about accuracy."

Unlike traditional media, which rewarded caution, the new incentives reward wild, emotional content. A sharply partisan political atmosphere, Jackson says, "has led to increasingly partisan cable TV, which gets ratings and makes money not by reporting facts but by expressing opinions that push people's buttons." He says it will stay that way: "Cash will keep flowing into the pockets of whoever can show they can carry on louder and longer."

And then there's the fine art of "framing," which is what Breitbart was doing. "People need to be aware," says Jackson, "of how easy it is to get people to see things in a certain way if you first frame it in a certain way. Framing is the technique of telling you what you should think about something before you see the evidence."

Hutchinson says, "The big problem is, a tone is set right at the beginning, and that's very hard to defeat. One person, in this case a right-wing hit machine with an agenda, puts out some toxic misinformation, then it becomes implanted, imprinted in the mainstream. Maybe somebody checks finally - but the problem is, it's already imprinted. First impressions are lasting impressions."

Behind these reasons lie even bigger ones. Conservative author David Frum wrote a moving essay for TheWeek.com calling Breitbart's actions a "shame." In a phone interview, Frum laments the extremists at both political poles who play dirty. "The institutions that used to enforce the rules are weaker than they used to be," he says, including "the unloved major media organizations and the value they placed on checking facts."

Once upon a time, Frum says, if a reporter brought an editor a juicy tape that obviously had been edited, "you would not immediately and uncritically put it on the air. For one thing, you had time, half a day, to check it." In addition, large media outlets were deep-pocketed targets for libel suits.

Despite our intense politics, central party structures are "weaker than they used to be," says Frum, "meaning that candidates, as long as they raise a lot of money, can do or say almost anything they please, and the party can't tell them to cool off, do their homework, work their way up the structure." The old brakes on excess, of language or of emotion, are off.

We're left in a strange place, Frum says, with an administration evidently worried about what happens on the Glenn Beck show.

"Every administration overlearns the lessons of the administration before," Frum says. "The Obama administration is afraid of having Donald Rumsfelds on its hands. So when this happens, they cry, 'Ax the woman, before the nighttime talk shows!' "