POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Columbia Journalism Review’s Limited Modified Hangout on Breitbart, #Weinergate

The dead enders are being dead-endy, but the truly sophisticated leftists know that they have to make some concessions to Weiner's forced confession, so this is the game they play:

The theme of many reports today then is that Breitbart, vilified as a composer of scoops rather than a reporter of them in the wake of Shirley Sherrod, is looking for apologies from the open left and some R-E-S-P-E-C-T from the M-S-M. He’s getting a little bit of it from the Times today in a balanced report titled “Andrew Breitbart, Conservative Blogger, Looks for Legitimacy.” And Politico has a main-page item headlined, “Andrew Breitbart’s day of vindication.” “In Andrew Breitbart’s up-and-down career as a conservative agitator, it doesn’t get any better than this,” write Keach Hagey and Kenneth P. Vogel, before describing the surreal Breitbart-Weiner presser.

They’re probably right. But both stories remind us of the checkered reportorial history that led reporters to view this latest scandal skeptically and to consistently view Breitbart himself suspiciously. You will recall the misleadingly edited video of a speech by USDA worker Shirley Sherrod, which showed Sherrod apparently bragging that she had discriminated against white farmers. An unedited version showed she had been making a speech about racial harmony. And you will recall that James O’Keefe’s ACORN video had suggested O’Keefe dressed as a pimp to go undercover at ACORN offices. He had not. The content of the videos remained disturbing, but the deception quickly became legend.

Breitbart may legitimately feel burned and now vindicated with how Weinergate has played out. And the media may need to address the way it treats scandals on the left and right. But it would be foolish not to acknowledge that there was reason to view anything that came from Mr. Big with some suspicion. He is the man who has cried “liberal scandal” too many times before.

Is it really so hard, for example, to credit Breitbart's version of the Sherrod affair--that he received only the part of the video that showed her making the admission that initially she hadn't wanted to help the white farmer, with the reaction of the assembled? I mean, is it so hard, considering the contortionist braintwists one had to adopt in order to credit Weiner's constantly morphing tale?

Was the ACORN story really about whether or not O'Keefe was wearing his pimp gear when he went into the offices, or that ACORN staff advised him how to skirt the law and the IRS in establishing his underaged illegal alien whorehouse operation? Is the story of Weinergate really, as Alex Pareene says, about Sarah Palin's version of Paul Revere's midnight ride? Have the MSM and the CJR really done any groundbreaking investigation into the massive fraud of Pigford?

Oddly enough, nowhere in Joel Meares' piece is there any consideration of whether or not all those media operations that spun and prevaricated for Weiner lost any credibility. Because, you know, they really do solid reporting.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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