David Frum - Shirley Sherrod and the shame of conservative media

When Andrew Breitbart unveils a selectively edited tape to defame a federal employee, conservatives blame Barack Obama

You want to see media bias in action? Okay — look at the conservative media reaction to the firing of Shirley Sherrod.

Sherrod is the former U.S. Department of Agriculture employee fired for supposed anti-white racism. On July 19, Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website posted a short video clip from a speech Sherrod had delivered to an NAACP gathering in March.

In the clip, Sherrod confessed to having deliberately declined on racial grounds to help a white farmer faced with a foreclosure on his farm. She was immediately terminated by the USDA and condemned by the national NAACP.

But a second look at the tape made it obvious that the tape had been severely edited, abruptly cut short. Within hours it emerged that the story on the tape was exactly the opposite of the story Breitbart had wanted to tell............................................