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L'Affaire Sherrod: Does anybody at The Times own a television set?
A completely discredited right-wing blogger posts an edited video which seems to convict a black Agriculture department official of racism. Fox News runs the distorted clip continuously on all of its shows Monday. Before giving Shirley Sherrod a chance to tell her side of the story, the Agriculture department demands and receives the resignation of the head of its rural development office in Georgia.
Sherrod said the final call came from Cheryl Cook, an undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture. White House officials, she said, told her to pull her car off the road and offer her resignation -- because the controversy was "going to be on Glenn Beck tonight."
No one with any sense would credit anything posted by the blogger in question, Andrew Breitbart, after multiple investigations have revealed that the ACORN videos he posted last year were heavily edited and completely misleading.
The fact that the Obama Administration jumped to fire its own official on the basis of evidence provided by Breitbart and exploited by Fox is as shameful as it is inexplicable.