I am mystified....the so called MSM has dozens....hundreds of so called professional reporters out there....folks who call themselves journalists. Yet not a single one of them is asking the one single question we really need to know about the altered tape, pushed by right wing "journalist" Andrew Breitbart, which claimed to show that USDA employee Shirley Sherrod was a racist who had favored blacks over whites in her work.
The question....who gave that tape to Breitbart?
Breitbart claims he had nothing to do with altering it from what we now know to be the original, but he didn't waste any time pushing it out to the media via his biggovernment.com website...even sending out a Twitter to help promote it. And although he claims he is a journalist, there are no signs that he bothered to question its origins or its validity before he sent it out.
Whoever gave that tape to Breitbart HAD to have known exactly what he or she was doing by altering it. To create the version which was aired seeming to portray Sherrod as a racist, that individual had to clearly know the contents of the full unedited tape. Why was there any need to edit that tape except to alter its meaning in a way which completely changed the apparent words of the speaker?
And why, once the editing was done, did that unknown individual choose Andrew Breitbart, of all "journalists" and biggovernment.com as the place to deliver it? After all, Breitbart was already in hot water for his role in the infamous ACORN tapes, later shown to have been heavily edited.
And the same folks who gave Breitbart the ACORN tapes were soon thereafter caught trying to gain entry to the Louisiana offices of Senator Mary Landrieu in hopes of placing wiretaps or bugs.
Andrew...who gave you that tape?
If you claim a status as a professional journalist, aren't you irate that your reputation has just been thoroughly discredited...that you got so badly burned? Why did you race to post that video without checking into its origins and its validity? After all you did that once before and it got you into a lot of trouble and didn't do much good for your reputation (except with FOX viewers who tend not to be terribly discriminating in their choice of valid news sources.)
And finally the big question to all you so-called professional journalists out there in the MSM:
Why aren't you turning over rocks to learn who deliberately altered that tape, destroyed the reputation of a decent woman, cost her her job and did so with malice aforethought?
David Gregory? Luke Russert, Diane Sawyer, Katie, George Will, David Broder, David Brooks? Anyone?
One report indicates that Matt Lauer just interviewed Shirley Sherrod and was "livid" over how she had been treated. Matt...we know what happened to Shirley. If you are so livid, why not get the resources of NBC digging into who gave Breitbart that tape and who may have been behind them?
Matt, anyone...........anyone? Do you even care? Aren't you embarrassed to be sitting there doing nothing?