When Shirley Sherrod spoke the words that a conservative blog-site agitator and Fox News ran with to smear her, she was in the midst of describing her passage from the angry prejudice of her youth in rural Georgia's brutal segregationist era, to the reconciliation that drew her to help a white farmer save his farm from foreclosure.
But an out-of-context snippet of Mrs. Sherrod's inspiring personal journey, described in a 43-minute speech that would make any compassionate person rejoice, was quickly and brutally twisted for political reasons. Then Mrs. Sherrod was hastily and wrongly fired by Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak from her job as chief of the department's rural development office in Georgia.
The end of this shameful episode is now known better than the beginning of it. President Obama has apologized to her. Mr. Vilsak has offered her a better job. And Fox News has stood glibly by, condemning the White House for running too quickly to put out a fire that its own arsonist talking heads maliciously and recklessly fanned into a political bonfire.
The actions of both sides reveal lessons worth noting. One concerns faux news and the arrogant and cruel deceit of exploiting racism for political advantage. The other illustrates the consequences of running so fast and in such fear from right wing propaganda mudslingers, the McCarthyites of our day, that the White House failed the test of due diligence and fairness to a powerless African-American woman who was brutally maligned, and who deserved far better treatment.
The speech that Mrs. Sherrod gave at an NAACP event in Georgia described what few white Americans have only read about. A relative was lynched by a sheriff. Her father, a farmer, was murdered by three white men who, despite witnesses to the crime, were not indicted by an all-white grand jury. She and her family lived in fear after a cross was burned in their yard.
From this background, she rose to become an employee of the Agriculture Department whose job was to arrange aid to qualifying farmers. She admitted to her audience that 24 years ago, one farmer's seeming arrogance elicited lingering prejudice in her, making her less disposed to give him the "full force" of all the help she believed black farmers needed.
But, she told her audience, that white farmer ultimately caused her to see that white farmers faced the same circumstances as black farmers. God taught her, she said, that "there is no difference between us. ... I've come to realize we have to work together."
The farmer's family confirmed her story. "She's a good friend," Eloise Spooner told The New York Times. "She helped us save our farm."
The full story of her speech was not explored until after the snippet taken from it by blogger Andrew Brietbart was so maliciously exploited by Bill O'Reilly on his prime-time show on Fox News, "The O'Reilly Factor." Without checking the background and full speech, he said she should be fired. That led other Fox News hosts to beat the drums to fire her.
The Department of Agriculture failed, as well, to check out the story, to ask Mrs. Sherrod about her speech, or to get a tape of her speech. Mr. Vilsak has said he acted alone in dispatching an official to demand that she resign. Mrs. Sherrod said she was told the White House wanted her to resign.
Regardless, it seems clear that the Obama administration caved with checking the facts out of fear that the Fox hoopla would inflate the story the way it did with Mr. Breitbart's contrived tapes that wrongly hung Acorn, the national community organizing group, over the actions of isolated incidents in just a couple of offices.
If it weren't crystal clear before, the faux news organization's agenda should be fully transparent by now. It will spare no effort to inflate undocumented stories to pitch its slanted views. And sadly, the Obama administration has turned and run, gun-shy when it should be willing to fight the propaganda deliberately spewed to weaken it.