Is Breitbart the Right's Dan Rather?

Conservatives acknowledge that Shirley Sherrod was unfairly defamed but still shy from criticizing Andrew Breitbart for his role in the controversy.

My latest column for The Week looks at the failure of the conservative media to criticize Andrew Breitbart for his role in the defamation and firing of Shirley Sherrod.

You want to see media bias in action? Okay — look at the conservative media reaction to the firing of Shirley Sherrod.

Sherrod is the former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee fired for supposed anti-white racism. On July 19, Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website posted a short video clip from a speech Sherrod had delivered to an NAACP gathering at some unspecified point in the past.

In the clip, Sherrod confessed to having deliberately declined on racial grounds to help a white farmer faced with a foreclosure on his farm. She was immediately terminated by the USDA and condemned by the national NAACP.

But a second look at the tape made it obvious that the tape had been severely edited, abruptly cut short. Within hours it emerged that the story on the tape was exactly the opposite of the story Breitbart had wanted to tell. …

By the morning of July 20 the Sherrod-as-racist narrative had collapsed.

What is most fascinating about that second day, however, was the conservative reaction to the collapse. At midday on the 20th, Rush Limbaugh was still praising Breitbart: "I know that Andrew Breitbart's done great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism and so forth saying she's not gonna help a white farmer."

By the evening of the 20th, however, conservatives were backing away, acknowledging that an innocent women had been defamed.

Here's Glenn Beck.

Here's Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.

Here's Instapundit.

Here's the popular Anchoress blog at First Things.

Even the racially incendiary Eric Erickson tweeted his disquiet, and then posted this on his RedState website.

But you’ll never guess who emerged as the villains of the story in this second-day conservative react. Not Andrew Breitbart, the distributor of a falsified tape. No, the villains were President Obama and the NAACP for believing Breitbart's falsehood.

Breitbart went almost universally unmentioned.

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