(05-10-2019, 10:18 PM)Last42min Wrote: From WaPo:

Quote:Breitbart posted a video he received from an anonymous source that showed Sherrod speaking at an NAACP civil rights dinner. There she told of the hesitation she had felt decades earlier when a white farmer came to her for help while she was working for a cooperative intended to aid black farmers who were losing their land at a fast rate.

The video, which did not include Sherrod’s remarks in full, made it appear that she did not help the white farmer as much as she could have, through counseling and other assistance, to save his failing farm. Sherrod became an instant lighting rod — painted as a racist African American bureaucrat. The incident served as an example of Breitbart’s ability to polarize.

Try again. You're fake news, bro. Now I can dismiss everything you say from here to eternity.

First of all, you should never take someone's claim that they had an anonymous source at face value.
But even if we presume that they're not lying about this, it was still up to them to vet what they received before they promoted it as true.
Andrew Breitbart put his name behind it.
When Fox news noticed this on his website and noticed it getting a lot of views, they assumed that some vetting must have been done by somebody working for Breitbart. So they quickly piggybacked on Breitbart.
Fox news will not make that mistake again and neither should any of us.
Real journalism is hard. It takes a big team of people. it takes patience and multiple phone calls to different interested parties.
We should only give a presumption of truth to things that come from big institutions that actually correct themselves, such as CNN and Fox news.  These little fly-by-night websites should never be thought of as anything but exaggerating parrots at best, but more often straight up hucksters.

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