Catch Up!

Tuli Kupferberg

R.I.P.

1923 – 2010

The Very Rev. Walter Hawkins

R.I.P.

1949 – 2010

Finally!

The Office of Thrift Supervision is going to be closed down!

This is not News on Fox

It was one of Mr. Breitbart’s Web sites, BigGovernment, that highlighted the heavily edited video clip of Shirley Sherrod, a black official at the Department of Agriculture, apparently saying that she had been biased against a white farmer she was supposed to help. Ms. Sherrod’s full speech actually demonstrated the opposite, but do not expect Mr. Breitbart to be embarrassed.

He says there is an election-year strategy under way to “falsely malign opponents of the Democratic party as racist” and that he will continue to fight it.

“It’s warfare out there,” he said in an interview on Sunday.

The “warfare” is happening partly in the conservative media, where Mr. Breitbart has shown an uncanny ability to play on the issue of race and have it amplified on news shows, talk shows and blogs. The Sherrod episode is hardly the first charge of reverse racism that has been raised by conservative media figures, nor the first that Mr. Breitbart has had a hand in.

But it is an open question whether conservative media outlets risk damage to their credibility when obscure or misleading stories are blown out of proportion and when what amounts to political opposition research is presented as news.

The New Normal

What Bob Herbert says!