P.S. on the Shirley Sherrod "scandal": they're still spouting B.S.
07/26/10 08:33 AM
By ED BARK
The truth-twisting continues in the aftermath of the media's sorry handling of the Shirley Sherrod "scandal."
We'll touch only briefly on it this time. But one point should be made. Anchor Chris Wallace, presiding over Fox News Sunday, and Fox News Channel representative Stephen Hayes on ABC's This Week program repeatedly contended that Fox didn't use Sherrod's name on the air until after she had been forced out by Agriculture Department secretary Tom Vilsack.
Wallace sparred with the ever-ineffectual Howard Dean, who accused Fox of pushing racism. Hayes was on a panel with Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile and host Jake Tapper, whom he told, "The timeline doesn't work. She (Sherrod) actually was forced to retire before anyone on Fox said a word about this."
Dean and the This Week panelists could have easily refuted this by saying, "Yes, but Bill O'Reilly taped his Monday night program before Sherrod was forced out." And on that program he called for her resignation based on the doctored video of her NAACP speech disseminated by right-wing and still unapologetic blogger Andrew Breitbart.
So yes, O'Reilly in fact did rush to judgment, even if his knee-jerk demand for Sherrod's resignation didn't actually air until after Vilsack had knee-jerked her out of the Agriculture Department while the national NAACP also made an ass of itself.
O'Reilly "apologized" on a subsequent edition of The Factor. But he then immediately attacked Sherrod on another front while also again deriding NBC/MSNBC for assailing Fox News.
Wallace and Hayes both know full well that O'Reilly's program is taped in advance. But they stuck to their markedly similar "talking points" in perpetuating the illusion that Fox News had in no way jumped the gun. That simply isn't true. But no one was smart enough to call them on it. Dean in particular ended up looking like a fool while Wallace happily and disingenuously carved him up.