If there were a better example of how our Rethuglican-wired, Washington beltway media has been corrupted than the Shirley Sherrod episode, we're hard pressed to find it. The typical life-cycle for the "Drudge Rules Our World" media crowd is as follows. First, right wing operatives (including those working for Rethug fronts like FreedomWorks) gin up a "controversy" either by spinning an event or making it up out of whole cloth. Second, Drudge/Breitbart/other wingnut outfits feed it into the mainstream media, who report on it with a straight face as if it's factual simply because, as Villager Cokie "Okie Dokie" Roberts once put it, "it's out there." Lastly, the Administration or other victim of the "controversy" is belatedly forced to respond to the falsehoods, which have already become villager conventional wisdom because they're too lazy or cynical to check facts first.
Greg Sargent noted in his blog that one way for this open sewer to be closed would be if the mainstream press stopped treating Breitbart, Drudge, etc. as their assignment editor:
"Big news orgs are far too willing to take their cues from people who are known to cook the facts on a regular basis. It's true that Gibbs didn't directly call out right wing media, but his point was clear enough, and one can only hope media figures give it a passing moment of thought and don't just cynically dismiss it as spin."Good advice, but extremely unlikely that the broken media will look themselves in the mirror. They threw the mirror out a long time ago.
(photo: "What's on Breitbart's website today? We've got a deadline to meet!")
