Topic: Media Research Center
MRC chief Brent Bozell's demand that the media falsely smear Shirley Sherrod was silly on its face, but his claim that the media ignored the story was based on an even more silly assumption: that the media has the same abysmally low standards as he does.
Turns out the media was well aware of the story; they -- unlike Bozell -- just chose to wait until Sherrod's words could be put in context.
CNN's Rick Sanchez pointed out that the network "had the story ... Monday before noon, and we decided not to go with the story because we didn't have a chance to verify it, because we hadn't seen the speech ourselves, because we weren't sure if part of the speech had been edited, because we hadn't had a chance to reach out to Shirley Sherrod. So because we didn't have those things, we here at CNN did not do this story."
Fox News' Shepard Smith said that he didn't run the story on his show because "we didn't who shot it, we didn't know when it was shot, we didn't know the context of the statement, and because of the history of videos on the site where it was posted. In short, we did not and do not trust the source."
Are these standards too high for Bozell? It appears so -- he had no problem promoting misleadingly edited videos whose source he did not know and whose context he made no effort to learn.
That's a lot of things, but it most definitely not "media research."
P.S. Bozell has yet to apologize for falsely smearing Sherrod as a racist, thus opening himself up to potential legal action against him on libel charges. He should know the drill, since he's been sued over making false claims before, over which the Parents Television Council, which he headed at the time, ultimately had to pay millions in damages and publish a retraction.
