US Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod was fired last July by the Obama White House soon after BigGovernment.com posted a 1 minute/40 second video excerpt purporting to show that, during a speech to the NAACP, Sherrod boasted about discriminating against a white farmer while she was a federal agriculture employee during the Obama administration. Actually, she was describing events in the 1980s when she was Georgia field director for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit that had grown out of the civil rights movement to help Black farmers; she was not a federal employee at the time.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, a fuller version showed that Sherrod told the story to illustrate how she had overcome her racial hostility toward whites and ultimately helped the white farmer save his farm.
BigGovernment is headed by Andrew Breitbart, a former DrudgeReport staffer.
Months earlier, other selectively-edited tapes distributed by Breitbart's BigGovernment.com (played repeatedly on Fox News and elsewhere) helped put the anti-poverty group ACORN out of business. Rachel Maddow dissects the distorted presentation that doomed ACORN.
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