Saw this over at Instapundit (emphasis mine):
ANN ALTHOUSE: George Packer’s Unfair Attack on Andrew Breitbart. Well, Andrew’s been dead over a year. So I guess Packer feels safe now. The “deceptively edited video” claim is false, of course.
Althouse links to this post at Slate.com, The Citizen Journalist, which contains the following (emphasis mine):
… Breitbart went on Real Time With Bill Maher and stood up for himself and Rush to the politically correct hometown mob of an audience, and it was an incredibly committed moment in his life. He found himself the leader of a loose band of patriotic malcontents, and right in front of him was the same opportunity that the Founding Fathers had had—to fight a revolution against the complex.And if he happened to get an Agriculture Department official named Shirley Sherrod fired by releasing a deceptively edited video that seemed to show her making anti-white comments when in fact she was doing just the opposite—fuck it, did the other side play fair? Anyway, Old Media’s rules about truth and objectivity were dead. What mattered was getting maximum bang from a story, changing the narrative. That was why Breitbart was winning, with ample help from his media enemies, and why he must have been at least semi-sober during his college classes on moral relativism.
The “deceptively edited” Shirley Sherrod tape is pure myth.
I debunked the claim with a frame-by-frame analysis showing that each of the elements which critics claimed were missing from the tape actually were in the tape, Repeat after me: “The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading”:
With Andrew Breitbart’s death this week, one of the most persistent falsehoods has resurfaced, the claim that the original tape released of Shirley Sherrod’s speech to an NAACP Chapter was misleading or defamatory in that it did not reveal that Sherrod’s discrimination against a white farmer was long ago, that she ended up helping him, and that she had since changed her view….Whether innocent or malicious, the narrative is wrong.I originally analyzed the alleged falsehoods when the controversy first broke in July 2010, The Original Sherrod Clip Was Not “False”.
The myth lives on because it’s a lazy, cheap way to denigrate Andrew Breitbart.
Read, Dissecting Shirley Sherrod’s Complaint Against Andrew Breitbart:
Additionally, the edited video reveals that Sherrod came to the realization that race was not the issue. In fact, this parable of the awakening of Sherrod to such realization is a key element of the supposed deception of the edited version, but in fact this awakening was revealed on the edited video:
And then Repeat after me again and again: “The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading”
Update: A reader sent along this video clip, which reminds me of something I often forget. Not only was the clip not “deceptively edited,” the point Breitbart made was not about Sherrod but about the audience reaction when she initially recited how she discriminated against a white farmer (the crowd applauded). Other people turned it into a story about Sherrod, and called her racist (the edited take contains the contrary information about her transformation, see above):
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