The hurried and unjust decision by the United States Department of Agriculture to dismiss a mid-level employee, Shirley Sherrod for comments made during an NAACP speech is a blatant and egregious example of a rush to judgment. Genuine democracy is sustained by truth and facts, not on the daily drumbeat of alleged news organizations whose anti-administration agenda is clear. It appears that the aim of the "new media" is by any means necessary to embarrassed the Obama government and make it appear inept and not up to the job.
What is particularly disturbing and worrisome about this episode is the manner in which the USDA dealt with a respected and longstanding employee. Asking her to pull off the road and send in her resignation via blackberry, without checking and verifying an allegation that she was engaged in making a racially insensitive remark, is unconscionable. What happened to the notion of "innocent until proven guilty?" What has become of due process? But that is mainly the tip of the iceberg.
The real tragedy here is how the media can willingly participate as co-conspirators with propagandists and within minutes destroy innocent lives in the name of freedom of expression. The lines between new and traditional media are being deliberately blurred to give corporate owned news organizations cover to do hit jobs on the Obama Administration.
The so-called "new media" is debasing of our democracy by engaging in a systematic undermining of what used to be a noble profession. The twenty-four hour news cycle has become the most destructive aspect of good, decent and honorable journalism. Excellent reporting of news is based on the time-tested process of fact checking, accuracy and verification. There should be absolutely nothing wrong with taking the necessary time to check and double check a story before it is broadcast and printed. The rush to meet the requirement of daily loops in a twenty-four hour cycle of news in a microwave environment is the single most dangerous aspect of this so called new media. In that glorified rush to be first, anyone with a fifty-dollar camcorder now claims to be a journalist. Consequently, the poison poured into the system makes a mockery of democracy and freedom of speech and constitutional rights become a convenient excuse for mischief-makers with outlandish and outrageous political agendas.
It is even more damning and outrageous for anyone to try to pass off as journalism the willful distortion of information to serve a mindless and racist constituency. Freedom of information is not a license for anyone to take a speech and strategically edit it with the clear intent to fuel racial division and tension. For the "new media" there is no boundary of decency, fairness and truth. The conservative zealots with camcorders and cameras and access to You Tube have become the perpetrators of hate and have attempted from the day President Obama declared his intent to seek Whitehouse residency to ignite a race war. The so called "new media" are simply individuals who have taken off their clan robes and are masquerading behind technological innovations to engage in public lynching of decent Americans.
The injustice visited upon Ms. Shirley Sherrod by a conservative blogger ably assisted by the right-wing media empire of Fox News and their associates in the traditional media, glaringly demonstrated that this group of unconscionable mischief makers will stop at nothing to achieve their destructive and misguided political objectives. They will engage in any atrocious acts to push an agenda that is racially biased and out of sync with mainstream Americans. The election of President Barack Obama, the first African-American to occupy the White House may have taken racial harmony to a new plateau. It did not take away the evil brewing within the souls of conservative cliques hell bent on a sixties existence.
It is not coincidental that this onslaught by the so-called "new media" has been viciously on the prowl since Obama won the election. There is a conscious decision by this rebel group to ferment racial tension in a vain attempt to make the country ungovernable. These daily venomous attacks against a legitimately elected government are unparalleled in American history. If Hillary Clinton thought that there was a "vast right-wing conspiracy," against her husband's administration; then there must be diabolical and racial attack machine whose purpose in life is to thwart the will of the American people. Never before has a President of the United States been referred to in such derogatory terms in the media. On a daily basis the administration is dubbed "stupid," "arrogant," "liars," and many others too outlandish to print. The goal of nut case conservatives is to so diminish the presidency so that the first African-American will appear to be incompetent in contrast with Caucasian presidents.
Ms. Shirley Sherrod became just a pawn in the bigger game of political subterfuge. While Ms. Sherrod became a victim of the dirty media manipulation, distortion and gross abuse of freedom of expression, which may very well be a criminal act, the bigger picture here is how the right-wing media is being used as willing partner to sew disharmony and discord in the country.
The story of how a con man like Andrew Breitbart, with a history of doctoring information to suit his political mission, was allowed to pass off his criminality as legitimate news is cause for serious concern by the American people. Even more disturbing was the glowing story about him done by ABC's Terry Moran for Nightline gloryifying his tactics after Sherrod was fired. Not only are the democratic institutions under attack by political hacks they have succeeded in pulling the traditional media into this pit of falsehood and deliberate propaganda. The honorable profession of journalism has been short-circuited by the bandits of the right in the guise of "new media."
This level of press manipulation and subjugation must be the wake up call to both the Obama administration and the American people. This is an era in which the media has allowed the noise from the right to dictate how news is covered. Too concerned about ratings and profits, the media is allowing the diatribe and poison to become real news. Consequently fact checking and verification of information is dismissed in order to be in step with the shouting from the right. You Tube’s most ridiculous posting now replaces genuine news instead of what is true and factual.
When the media turn away from being the conscience of our nation and are in league with the enemies of democracy, then freedom of expression is meaningless.