Kemstone's Journal

I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember voting for Glenn Beck for president. I don’t think many Obama supporters, upon casting their vote in 2008, were hoping that once president he would bend over backwards to do everything he possibly could to appease Fox News. I could be wrong—maybe Obama voters were really hoping for a president who would ignore progressives and listen only to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—but somehow I find that hard to believe.

Excuse me for ranting but I’ve got the need. Cenk Uygur’s epic rant over the Shirley Sherrod debacle on Wednesday’s Young Turks got me fired up. Between that and a dozen other columns and blog entries I’ve read these last couple of days, it’s clear that this story is far more significant than I initially realized.

At first my anger was directed almost entirely at Fox News. I couldn’t believe how so many people can still see them as an actual news organization when they clearly have a political agenda and will rush to broadcast any story that fits their pre-existing narrative with a deliberate disregard for what the actual facts are. Their #1 agenda is to do political harm to Obama. When presented with a heavily-edited video that seemed to show an employee of Obama’s department of agriculture boasting about how she discriminated against a white farmer, they didn’t waste a single moment checking to see whether it was what it appeared to be.

They could have found the entire unedited video but didn’t. They could have tried to contact Sherrod for her side of the story but didn’t. Most egregiously, they didn’t even try to contact the white farmers who were supposedly the victims of this discrimination, as if they had they would have learned—as the rest of the country learned when actual journalists stepped onto the scene—that Sherrod actually helped them save their farm, and that the story she’d been telling in that video was about how she learned that it was wrong to discriminate based on color.

But the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod before any journalism was done—before any basic questions were even asked. Sherrod told reporters that she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation via text message because she had to be gone by the time Glenn Beck went on the air.

Brillliant move on the White House’s part. Obviously they learned their lesson from the Van Jones fiasco, when they let Fox News hammer them for days before finally getting rid of him. No doubt they were patting themselves on the back for swift, decisive action when they got rid of Sherrod within a single news cycle.

Surely they had fixed everything. Fox News, upon seeing how quickly the administration caved in to them, would undoubtedly give him all the credit in the world and begin reporting how they’d been wrong about him all along—that he’s really not a reverse-racist and that he should be applauded for getting rid of Sherrod.

Of course not. Their number one agenda, remember, is to harm Obama politically. So when he did exactly what they wanted him to do, they hammered him for that! How could he fire her so quickly before checking all the facts? I can’t believe he just threw that poor woman under the bus like that. I mean, we’re Fox News so it’s not our job to check the facts but surely the White House has a responsibility to get the whole story before taking action.

And on that, they’re absolutely right. It’s not Fox News’s responsibility to report the truth—they are a propaganda network, not a news organization—but the White House does have a responsibility to make sure that the actions they take are based on hard facts and solid evidence.

But apparently that’s not how they operate. It would seem that they’ve got their eyes on Fox News at all times and stand ever poised to deflate whatever criticism that network might be leveling against them. They say Van Jones is a communist? Get rid of him. They say ACORN is full of criminals? Cut off its funding. Just please don’t hate us, right-wingers. We swear we’ll do whatever you say, Glenn Beck. Just stop saying mean things about us. What is it you want us to do? Just tell us who to fire and they’ll be out of here by 5 p.m.

Last year, in the midst of the health care debacle, I asked whether Obama was a pussy or a sell-out. I keep going back and forth on that question, but this drove me firmly back to the pussy side of the equation. Running the country based on Fox News talking points? How weak and pathetic can you possibly be?

What the hell do you think you’re actually accomplishing with this strategy? You think that if you keep caving in to Fox News, one day conservatives are suddenly going to change their minds about you? That if you keep compromising on all your progressive ideals and delivering watered-down, industry-friendly legislation, that right-wingers are going to start saying, “You know, maybe we were wrong about him. He might not be a radical socialist after all.”

News for you: That. Will. Never. Fucking. Happen.

So deal with it. Give up this absurd act of chasing your own tail all day long, turn off the goddamn Fox News channel, and run the country the way you would run it if there were no such thing as the Glenn Beck program.

Or better yet, listen to both sides. Progressives have criticisms too, and theirs are actually based in reality. Instead of only taking Bill O’Reilly’s advice, try listening to Rachel Maddow for once. Her advice is actually designed to help you.

The Shirley Sherrod thing, in itself, is just a small story. But taken in the larger context of the way Barack Obama has been conducting his administration, it’s one of the most important political events of his presidency. It’s one of those Wizard of Oz moments when the curtain is drawn back and you see who’s really running the show.

The strategy is clear: Don’t waste any time worrying about what liberals and progressives are saying because liberals and progressives don’t matter. They will never vote for republicans, so you gain nothing by doing anything more than the bare minimum to appease them. You win elections by appealing to swing-voters, to the moderate center, to the people who want to see both parties working together in a bipartisan fashion to accomplish things in Washington. When conservatives criticize you, you should immediately respond to that criticism in order to show how much of a centrist you are and how much you’re willing to listen to the other side.

The strategy is also dead wrong. I don’t know who this imaginary moderate centrist voter is, but I’ve never met him. Is there a single American voter who wasn’t sure about Obama until he dropped the public option, watered-down financial reform, called for more offshore oil drilling, fired Van Jones and de-funded ACORN? Seriously, I want to know how many people will go to the polls and vote for democrats this Fall because Obama proved to them that he’s not ‘too liberal’.

It’s complete and utter bullshit, and it’s so frustrating that Obama is so wrapped up inside his Washington bubble that he can’t even see it. He thinks that Bush’s approval ratings were so low because he spent too much time appeasing his base and never compromising with the other side. Wrong—Bush’s approval ratings were so low because everything he did as president was a total disaster. But at least he got shit done.

Why don’t you try that strategy for awhile, Obama? Why don’t you take a “Bring ‘em on” approach to Fox News and let them say whatever the hell they want to say while you deliver on the Change you promised? The Washington punditocracy will no doubt say you’ve gone off the deep-end, that you’re drifting perilously to the left and that this center-right country won’t stand for it. But you know what? You might find that in the Fall, liberals and progressives will actually come out and vote instead of staying home. You might even find that these all-important centrist-moderates you’re so concerned about actually come out and vote for democrats as well because…golly gee…it turns out they didn’t actually care about bipartisan posturing as much as they cared about government actually getting shit done.

Wake up, Obama. You’ve handed control of the country over to Fox News and you wonder why you’re heading for a failed presidency. In 2012 you should just let voters write in Glenn Beck’s name instead of yours so he can run the country directly without a middle-man.

So much has been written about the Shirley Sherrod saga that it’s almost not worth it for me to put my two cents in, but here goes.

For those of you who don’t watch cable news, here’s the basic run-down of the story. Conservative activist Andrew Breitbart posted what he claimed was video evidence of reverse-racism in the Obama administration. It was from a speech given by Shirley Sherrod, who until yesterday worked in Obama’s department of agriculture, in which she talked about not wanting to help white farmers keep their property because she didn’t think any white people deserved her help.

At the drop of a hat, Fox News picked up this story and ran with it, hyperventilating all day long about this vile racism and what it says about Obama’s back-door reparations agenda—the completely bogus narrative the network sells to its viewers. Other networks followed suit and before you knew there was so much pressure that Shirley Sherrod was fired by the Obama administration before she even knew what hit her.

Later in the day, the entire video came out. It turns out that what was previously released had not only been taken out of context, but edited so heavily that the entire message of her story had been completely reversed. Sherrod was talking about how her first inclination upon seeing this white farmer was that she didn’t owe him any help, but upon delving deeper into his situation she realized that he was just as much of victim of the broken system as black people—that it’s not about black vs. white but rich vs. poor—and that from that day on she no longer judged people purely based on race. The whole point of the story was completely anti-racist—the exact opposite of what Brietbart and Fox News were saying it was.

Not only that, but upon contacting the supposed “victims” of her racism—the farmer and his wife—the news media learned that they are eternally grateful to Shirley Sherrod and consider her a friend for life.

This is not just a harmless mistake on the part of a news organization. This was a deliberate, calculated effort to add to the perception that Obama and his administration are racist and that they’re out to financially harm white people. There was a definite agenda behind this reporting, and that agenda was not to report the “fair and balanced” truth.

There used to be something called journalism in this country. It used to be that a news organization didn’t run with the story until they looked into it and made sure they knew the facts. When presented with an edited video clip, there are a number of steps that an actual journalist would take before jumping to conclusions and ranting about it on the air. For one thing, you could look for the entire video—it was available. You could contact Shirley Sherrod herself—she was available. You could contact the farmers who were the supposed victims of the racism—they were available too.

But instead of doing any of this, they leapt on the air and hammered home the “Obama is a racist” point as much as possible before real journalists could do their job and they’d have to quietly issue their corrections—but not until the damage was done. Shirley Sherrod, as of the time of this writing, is still without a job.

You can not consider Fox News a “news” organization. It just isn’t. It’s not a real news organization. Yes, other networks are blameworthy for picking up on the story before all the facts had come to light, but Fox News deliberately ran with it because it was exactly the kind of story they needed. Fox News is not news at all. It’s corporate-conservative propaganda. It’s a tool for the power-elites to keep the people under control by misdirecting their anger away from those truly responsible for their suffering—multi-national corporations—and towards fake boogeymen like a racist president hell-bent on taking money from white people and redistributing to black people. No such president exists—it’s a fictional character dreamt up in corporate think-tanks—but if all you watch is Fox News you’d have no way of knowing that. You’d really think some angry black politician is gunning for you.

ACORN, Van Jones, and now Shirley Sherrod have fallen victim to this despicable game. The Obama administration ought to be ashamed for just buckling at every turn and throwing these people and organizations under the Fox News bus before even checking to see what the actual facts are.

But it’s supposed to be the job of news organizations to check facts. They could have easily done it, but Fox News didn’t check the facts, and for that reason no serious, honest, objective person could possibly consider it a real news organization.

UPDATE: Living in Europe means I’m usually about 24 hours behind the news cycle. Since writing this I’ve heard some new insight, particularly from the Rachel Maddow show, that present this incident in a broader context than conservative perceptions of the Obama administration. This is primarily about the effectiveness of the southern strategy—the idea of the angry black man coming for the white man’s privilege—which has been used by politicians to win elections long before the world was controlled by multi-nationals. However, corporations no doubt recognize the benefits of this idea in terms of its divisiveness and power of misdirection, and they are consciously keeping it alive by using Fox News as their tool.