It’s interesting to see how the right is trying to salve their conscience over what Andrew Breitbart did to Shirley Sherrod’s career and reputation. Even when they acknowledge the moral imperative for Breitbart to apologize they then turn right around and say that he shouldn’t under the circumstances. Here’s Scott Johnson from Powerline:
Yesterday I asserted that Andrew had made a mistake and owed Shirley Sherrod an apology. Whether I am right or wrong about that, I also think he is right to withhold it under the circumstances…
…With the hounds baying, Andrew deserves the support of conservatives in his struggle with the Democrat-Media complex.
One constant in our political culture is that both the left and the right see the media as biased against them. It’s easy to explain the left’s position. Media is highly consolidated in this country and controlled by very large corporations like Disney, General Electric, and News Corp. Their corporate interests bleed down into the coverage they provide. It’s harder to see how the right can ignore this basic, inarguable, fact and insist that the media is biased against them. But it comes down to social conservatism. Media corporations may be fiscally conservative but they’re also peddling promiscuity and sexual objectification. Beyond that, they’re creatures of an Establishment that has accepted the New Deal and the Great Society and women’s rights and gay rights and the moral rectitude of the Civil Rights movement. The social conservatives have fought all of those issues and have never fully embraced any of them, even in retrospect. Therefore, their worldview has never been reflected or even particularly respected in the corporate media world.
That’s why they see obviously right-wing outfits like ABC News as somehow tilted against them. They’re wrong about that, but not in the way many think. The corporate media is tilted against radical ideas from both sides, and they get to define what is radical. Canada’s health care system is radical. So is any effort to privatize Social Security. Scandanavian day care provisions are radical, but so is ripping up the Civil Rights Act protection against segregated lunch counters. The corporate media ridicules ideas that are out of the mainstream regardless of what side they come from and regardless of their intrinsic merit.
If you want to radically change the way the federal government works by, say, introducing an entirely new interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, don’t expect favorable or sympathetic coverage from the corporate media. But you face the same problem advocates of single-payer health care face. They’re biased, but they’re not biased against one side or the other so much as they’re biased against radical change. Social conservatives convince themselves that the problem is that mainstream culture has radically changed and their proposals are straightforward calls to return to what used to be uncontroversial and normal. In some cases they are correct about that, in others they have created an idyllic past that never actually existed.
However you want to look at it, there is still no justification for smearing people with misleading video editing. The instinct to condemn Breitbart is the correct one, and trying to justify his actions as mere tit-for-tat isn’t morally convincing in the least.
