By Brad Friedman on 7/20/2010, 7:43pm PT  

For those who have asked, no, I'm not particularly interested in Andrew Breitbart's latest, deceptively-edited video scam campaign which, shamefully, the Obama Administration and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack fell for before bothering to view the whole video.

We did what we did earlier this year --- exposing Breitbart's ACORN scam in extraordinary detail and for months on end --- in hopes that the rest of the media would not fall for such scams again in the future.

Clearly, the entirety of the corporate MSM has yet to fully learn the lesson. (e.g., see this piece on Washington Post's ombudsman falling for Fox/Breitbart's ridiculous "New Black Panther Party" non-scandal, non-story over the weekend and WaPo's embarrassing coverage of the Sherrod incident tonight --- even after the hoax has been exposed --- where they waited until the 15th graf(!) to note the video was deceptively edited!) Obviously, the Obama Administration hasn't learned its lesson at all, as witnessed by the firing of Shirley Sherrod without any due diligence.

But it's nice to see that, this time, it took many in the media just 24 hours or so before catching on to Breitbart's hoax...

Contrast that to the more than six months it took most of them to catch on to the ACORN "Pimp" Hoax. And even now, many of them still buy into that fake story and continue to report on it completely inaccurately.

Now, if any of them can bother to actually fact-check these phony wingnut stories before reporting them at all --- and keep from ruining even more people's lives and careers needlessly in the bargain --- maybe we'd be somewhere. But Rome wasn't built in a day, and the self-loathing failure of the corporate MSM and the Democrats who cower in fear of the Right along with them, didn't get that way over night either.

So I guess it'll take all of them some time to get over their years of abused spouse syndrome. But maybe --- just maybe --- this time they've learned a lesson about the partisan cretins and liars that they cover as if they were legitimate. Or maybe they haven't. We'll see. I suspect much more of this garbage between here and November, at the very least.

For those who do care about this story, or have no idea what I'm talking about, Rachel Slajda has all you can eat at TPM today. If you prefer watching over reading, Chris Matthews did a decent job of summing much of it up earlier this evening and CNN's Rick Sanchez is due credit for his coverage as well. Both of those videos are below. [UPDATE: So is Maddow's now, probably best of the lot, as usual.]

I'm just glad someone else bothered to debunk this garbage this time around, so I didn't have to. For now, anyway. I'm sorry I had to lend even this many words to it.

Oh, and President Obama: Do the right thing, for once, and beg Shirley Sherrod to take her old job back with your greatest apologies.

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Mathews segment on MSNBC follows below...


Sanchez' segment on CNN, including an interview with the family of the farmer from Sherrod's deceptively edited story, folows below...


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UPDATE: As usual, the best coverage in the corporate MSM on Breitbart scams comes from Maddow, who also gets her criticism of the Obama Administration right on the money as well...


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