Sherrod video: Misleading and partisan, some say, but libelous?

By Ty Tagami

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Misleading and even "evil."

That's how some are describing a heavily edited video that appeared on Internet publisher Andrew Breitbart's Web site this week, triggering a controversy that reached from Georgia to the White House.

The three-minute video led to the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod on Monday. In that video, Sherrod, who is black, said she didn't offer as much help as she could have to a white farmer at risk of losing his property. Instead, she sent him to a white lawyer.

The excerpt is cut just before she reveals what ultimately happened, and the moral of her story: When she discovered that the lawyer had done nothing for his client and that foreclosure was imminent, she rallied to the farmer's aide, and she had an epiphany that would guide the rest of her life.

Sherrod, who says in the video that she was speaking on the 45th anniversary of the murder of her father by a white man, said she initially committed her life to helping blacks. But then she saw how the white farmer struggled, and she broadened her commitment.

“God helped me see that it’s not just about black people," Sherrod went on to tell those gathered for an NAACP banquet in Coffee County, according to the full-length video. "It’s about poor people, and I’ve come a long way."

The NAACP, which had released a statement Monday critical of Sherrod, backtracked Tuesday after obtaining the full video, and said it had been "snookered" by Breitbart.

The excerpted video was produced "with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans," NAACP President Ben Jealous asserted in a statement. It "was deliberately edited to create a false impression of racial bias, and to create a controversy where none existed."

The wife of the white farmer, Eloise Spooner, leaped to Sherrod's defense, saying that Sherrod worked tirelessly to help her and her husband hold onto their land as they faced bankruptcy.

And the owner of DCTV, the television production company that recorded the entirety of Sherrod's speech at that March event, said the excerpt was misleading. The speech ran repeatedly on a local public access channel, DCTV owner Johnny Wilkerson said.

"It makes me upset that this guy grabbed it and made something evil out of it," Wilkerson said. "He took it out of context."

Breitbart has several Web sites that post a mix of news and opinion.

Big Government, the one that released the Sherrod video, has taken aim at liberals. It launched last year with damaging undercover videos of the housing advocacy group Acorn, which later disbanded, blaming Breitbart.

In June, Democrat Congressman Bob Etheridge of North Carolina went on the defensive with a public apology after Big Government posted a video of him grabbing the neck of an anonymous young questioner who was filming him on the street and asking whether he supported the Obama agenda.

In a recent article entitled "The Saboteur," Wired Magazine described how Breitbart "infiltrated the media machine, fought the vast left-wing conspiracy, and reinvented mudslinging for the age of the Web."

Breitbart did not respond to an e-mailed request for an interview Wednesday, and his cellphone was not taking messages.

Meanwhile, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack would apologize to Sherrod, but stopped short of saying whether she would get her job back.

One media expert said the editing job on the Sherrod video produced what sounded like partisan "propaganda" rather than journalism. While all journalists excerpt comments to varying degrees, they generally strive to portray an objective accounting of events, said Roy Peter Clark, the senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"In this case, there's clearly a pre-judgment" that exposure "will hurt the liberal cause, will hurt the Democrats, will hurt the president," he said.

An Atlanta expert on libel law said the video could conceivably open the door to a lawsuit by Sherrod, were she so inclined. It's not the editing that matters from a legal standpoint, said the lawyer, John C. Stivarious Jr. After all, the edited video accurately captures her words.

Rather, it's the text that was overlayed onto the video as an introduction that could be libelous. It says that Sherrod "admits" that "she discriminates against people due to their race."

"If that statement is not true, that's problematic," Stivarious said. "It certainly impugns her character and it's out in the public for all to see."