Louisville Courier Journal Editorial: One Strike And You're Out. A BIG *SIGH*.

One strike and you're out

Shirley Sherrod is the only person to escape the disgraceful and cooked-up “scandal” surrounding her this week with dignity and credibility unscathed.

Everyone else — from the right-wing Internet propagandist, Andrew Breitbart, who defamed her with a misleading video; to the media pundits who offered instant opinions instead of doing due diligence on the suspect story; to the media consumers who unblinkingly believed something because they wanted to believe it; to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Obama administration officials who fired first and asked questions later — is sullied by this incident.

While the subject of race is never far from the surface of American conversation, the election of the first African-American president of the United States has produced enough heat among some citizens to cause the issue to bubble over in unfortunate ways, such as this one. Ms. Sherrod, the Georgia state director of rural development for the Agriculture Department, got burned this time.

Or maybe not.

Briefly, Mr. Breitbart posted a very small portion of a speech Ms. Sherrod, who is black, had made to an NAACP branch on his www.biggovernment.com site. (Based on this episode, perhaps it should be renamed biglie.com .) In that sliver, she spoke of a 24-year-old incident in which she said she didn't help a white farmer as much as she could have.

Neither her story, nor the tape, ended there.

Once the entirety of her speech was made public, Ms. Sherrod seemed to epitomize the grace and reconciliation so many of us seek about race. Not only did she challenge her own ideas about the issue, she helped save the farm and white farmers she spoke of and said she learned there is no difference between people of different races.

Would that the same qualities have informed those who tried to exploit a fraction of her speech for race-baiting purposes, and those who over-reacted to that sliver of a longer, richer narrative.

Mr. Breitbart is who he is and he does what he does, and those who have bought into his warped view of the nation now have been amply informed and warned about how he operates. Conservatives should recognize that their causes are not helped by this sort of damaging misadventure, and they ought to repudiate the tactic and the tactician, and so should everyone else dragged into his bogus business.

But the NAACP and the Obama administration — in particular Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack — should have known better than to jump to the conclusion offered on a platter by Mr. Breitbart's selective presentation of facts. A potential flashpoint, dolled up in the issue of race, combined with an unforgiving news cycle and a deafening blogosphere, drove smart people to take quick and faulty action in regard to Ms. Sherrod, who says she was forced to resign from her job. In rushing to put out the phony fire started by the Breitbart propaganda, both groups betrayed and denied their own standards of fairness, and justice for all.

If Ms. Sherrod was collateral damage in today's blood-sport politics, she also was fodder for the insatiable appetite for tidbits in what has become Twitter Nation.

Not everything, and not everyone, can be compressed to a two-minute video. Some ideas, and some stories, need and deserve more than 140 characters for expression and understanding.

Shirley Sherrod certainly deserved more.