Shirley Sherrod, Fox News and Pavlov's Dog

Perhaps it's just me but I can't help but notice something. When it comes to the placing of blame on the Shirley Sharrod firing, there are two camps.

One camp, which includes Progressives, typically agree that the Obama Administration (by which they mean Vilsack, Sherrod's boss) was wrong to fire her before knowing all the facts. Likewise, Sherrod is yet another victim of a well coordinated right wing smear machine of which Fox is the most public part.

The other camp, primarily conservatives who watch Fox agree with the first part. However they vehemently disagree with the claim that Fox or Breitbart or any part of the right wing media had any responsibility. After all, they say, Sherrod was already fired by the tiem this really began hitting the airwaves on Fox. So how could they have had anything to do with it?

That would be a good point...if we ignored recent history and treated this like an isolated incident.

I have a theory and excuse me if someone beat me to this.

For months Fox has been on the forefront of attacking Obama. Accusations sometimes come whole cloth from them or percolate from right wing blogs like Breitbart's site It doesn't mater since Fox's job is to make sure these stories get reported to give an air of credibility and mass audience.

Not that long ago Beitbart did videos attacking ACORN that were heavily edited and made them seem to be saying something they actually weren't. That ACORN wasn't doing what they were accused of didn't matter. That Breitbart and his accomplices had lied didn't matter. It fed the right wing need for a corrupt shadow organization and Obama was "corrupt" by mere association. Obama was blasted by the right as a supporter of an organization that assists child prostitution. Smearing ACORN and and smearing Obama became the same thing. ACORN closed it's doors not long after.

In the following months, another meme begins to see play by Fox and the right wing media, that Obama is secretly racist. Indeed cons have been saying that the civil rights movement was really about discrimination against white people for decades. But now we have a Black President and one can cast this in a more conspiratorial light. That this also would distract from charges that the tea party was racist didn't' hurt either.

This month Breitbart puts out another video that seems to prove this idea that it's really Obama and liberals in general who are the real racists.

Vilsack hears about this and remembers ACORN and Van Jones and Death Panels. Is it true? It doesn't matter he thinks. The truth didn't help much all those other times and the administration has enough to worry about without wasting time and energy on this. He does the politically expedient thing and fires Sharrod before what happened before can happen again.

He even admits to Sherrod that she's being fired so this so the story stays off Glen Beck.

Fox News now has a bit of a problem. Sherrod was fired too quickly. "Obama Fires Racist" doesn't really fit the "Obama is a Racist" idea. But "Obama fires innocent woman before he knows all the facts" can still be used to attack him with and shift blame away from the people who originally started that lie.
And Fox viewers believe it, condemning Obama for not getting all the facts first and watching the whole video.. while in the same breath still believing ACORN was helping child prostitution.

This is hardly flattering for Obama's administration, of course, that they and others continued to act as if the right has any credibility when they have good reason to know otherwise.

But it was also an expected even a conditioned response to one attack after another over and over. This happened in part because the administration has grown punch shy.

We can't stop Fox and Breitbart from trying to throw the punches. But that doesn't mean we need to react to them the same way.

Vilsack hears about it and doesn't think fuck-all about Fox News or Breitbart. Rather, he thinks of the thing that occupies his time and annoys his life every single day: the discrimination suits against USDA. It's much more likely that Sherrod's firing had very little to do with what anyone thought of Fox News or right wing media, and much more to do with the effect of the endless discrimination settlements on USDA in general and Vilsack and his staff in particular.

Why did Cheryl Cook tell Shirley Sharrod that the White House didnt' want this story on Glen Beck?

Somebody was thinking about Fox news.

And she didn't say the WH mentioned Glenn Beck. She said that the Undersecretary at USDA said it was going to be on Glenn beck tonight. These are two different things altogether. Cook informed Vilsack, who told her to can Sherrod. Cook then advised the WH point person for AG on what would happen, and that person likely said, OK, then. Good work. And Cook then communicated that the WH wanted her to resign, probably on that basis. And Sherrod took that as definitive. All you have for WH involvement is Sherrod's word, which is clearly good. The problem is that it is hearsay, quite literally (she heard Cook say it). What actually transpired between Cook and the WH point person for USDA, I have no idea, and neither do you, and - most importantly - neither does Ms. Sherrod.

The Undersecretary you mentioned.

And that kind of backs up what I was saying.

Someone was worried that Fox news would start pushing this the way they pushed all the other scandals.

I never said I knew for a fact what was transpiring in each person's head that was involved. That's why I said this was a theory. But so far it fits the available facts.

Could have been any network running it. Cook mentioned it because that's the call she received. The real issue was the ongoing discrimination claim against USDA, not some weirdo fear of Fox "theorized" by you and various others.

BTW, I mentioned Cook specifically at least two times in my response.