The Nature of Things

I grew up with a great admiration for the profession of journalism. People like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid were early heroes of mine. Later, the dogged investigation of Woodward and Bernstein in trying to crack the Watergate case and drag all those dirty little secrets into the light was a source of inspiration to me. Later still, I married a journalist and, nearly thirty-seven years later, I am still married to him, so you can take my word for it that I do respect and even revere the profession of journalism. It makes me very angry to see it misused and abused. Andrew Breitbart, who died today, was a prime example of the most serious kind of abuse and misuse. Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger and activist who used undercover video to bring discredit and disgrace to his liberal targets, died Thursday. He was 43. Mr. Breitbart was as polarizing a figure as he was popular. Hailed by the political right as a truth-teller who exposed bias and corruption, he...

If you've been watching television or reading newspapers at all this week, you probably cannot have escaped seeing the picture of a man's bulging crotch in his tidy whities that is alleged to be of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Weiner is alleged by right-wing scumbag Andrew Breitbart to have taken the picture and sent it via Twitter to a young college student. Weiner denies that he sent the picture. He says his Twitter account was hacked and he has hired a legal firm to look into what happened. Several bloggers, doing what the mainstream media would do if it had not completly abdicated its responsibility, have investigated the matter and turned up some evidence supporting Weiner's denial. Personally, I am inclined to give the benefit of a doubt to anyone attacked by Breitbart, given his history of fabrication of scandals such as the ACORN vs. the pimp story or the tale of Shirley Sherrod's racism. Both stories were completely false, but Breitbart and his henchmen, al...

By now, unless you've been asleep for the last few days, I'm sure you have heard of Shirley Sherrod, the former head of the Department of Agriculture's rural development office in Georgia. She is the "former head" because a right-wing hack put together a highly edited video of her speaking to a group in which she talked about something that happened back in the 1980s when she worked for a non-profit group in Georgia. She was asked to help a white farmer who was about to go bankrupt and lose his farm. She reflected on all the times that black farmers had been in similar circumstances and had not received help and she considered whether she, an African-American woman, should do her best for this white farmer. In the end, she did, and she helped him save his farm and his way of life. The right-wing operative edited the video to make it appear that Ms. Sherrod was saying that she did not help the farmer because he was white. Fox "News" (of course!) pi...