Looks like someone's none too happy about Fox being called out for their race-baiting. Brit Hume does his best to attempt to turn ClusterFox into the victim and claims Shirley Sherrod "got off easy" after they got caught helping Andrew Breitbart push his doctored tapes of her speech at the NAACP.
HUME: As victims of unfair media treatment go, Shirley Sherrod got off easy. Within 24 hours or so, from her forced resignation from the Agriculture Department, she'd been apologized to, offered a new job and later even, as Bret mentioned, got a call from the president himself. All of this a consequence of a truncated Internet videotape that made it appear she had once done less than her best for a white farmer because of his race. It was unfair and the apologies were deserved, but the initial rush to judge Sherrod was not the only rush to judgment in this affair.
Consider: Sherrod herself say she was ordered last Monday to resign immediately by a senior agriculture official who said Sherrod was going to be on Glenn Beck's FOX program that night. In fact, Beck did not say a word about Sherrod until the next night when he defended her. Bill O'Reilly called for her to step down on Monday but by her account, she had already quit before he spoke. And O'Reilly apologized the next night.
Indeed, Shirley Sherrod was not mentioned on FOX News Channel or on foxnews.com either until after the Obama administration had forced her out. And no news as opposed to opinion broadcasts on FOX ever accused Sherrod of racism. But she blamed FOX and accused the network of racism. So did numerous others, including the NAACP and former Democratic Chairman Howard Dean on "FOX News Sunday," though it became clear from Chris Wallace's questioning that Dean had no idea what the facts where.
You might think all these would be the stuff of further apology. But somehow I'm not holding my breath -- Bret.
BAIER: So, Brit, do you think this is the end of this?
HUME: Well, I think it's the end of the Sherrod case, you know, except for whatever she decides to do. She's in pretty good shape right now. As whether it's the end of this kind of hurling about the charge of racism willy-nilly, I have my doubts. For example, last week, we saw in these stories and accounts of the journal list web communications among basically liberal journalists, some of them in the mainstream media. And one of them suggested at one point during the Reverend Wright affair affecting Barack Obama's campaign that they ought to just call some conservatives, Fred Barnes, Karl Rove "Who cares" this journalist wrote, a racist. With that kind of use of the term "racist," willy-nilly is a weapon. I don't think we've seen the end of it.
BAIER: OK, Brit, thanks.
HUME: You bet.
