PunkFloyd, King of Bards wrote:
I'm curious if Fox News pointed its viewers to the blog. You know, for context.
As I've said repeatedly, I'm not defending or even overly aware of how Fox News presented this video. I think I caught a brief bit about it in between watching DVR'd shows Monday night. I don't sit around waiting for Fox News to tell me what to think about things. The brief bit I did see absolutely did present the video in the context of the NAACP members response to what she was saying. That's not to say that folks like Hannity didn't go off in some other direction, but that's not what I personally saw.
That some people took the video out of context is certainly a legitimate complaint, but Joph is attempting to argue that Breitbart himself took it out of context. And to support that, Joph is insisting that we not read the blog entry Breitbart wrote in which he said "context matters" and wrote a dozen or so paragraphs setting up the context of the video prior to embedding it into the blog. Which seems somewhat self-defeating to me. Obviously, if you insist on taking it out of context, it'll be "out of context". But if you read the whole blog entry and then watch the video, it's pretty darn clear what the context was and that the section of the video shown matched the intended point he was trying to make.
I immediately understood this yesterday after reading this thread, going to the blog, and actually reading what was written without any pre-conceptions. No one told me that was what was intended, it was just obvious upon actually reading the blog itself. And today, we have several interviews where Breitbart states the exact same thing I was saying yesterday: That it's not about her. It's about the audience reaction to what she was saying in that specific section of the video.
He says this in the paragraph immediately preceding the video in the blog. I said it yesterday on this thread. He's stated it again today in interviews. Are you guys suggesting that Andrew Breitbart and I got together to make sure our stories were straight yesterday afternoon or something? Or maybe, just maybe, I understood what he was saying, and most of you did not.
I'll quote the paragraph immediately preceding the video in his blog again:
Quote:
Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.
This is what the video clip is about. Its purpose was to show NAACP members approving and agreeing an act of racism committed against a white person. It's not about what someone did 24 years ago, but about the responses from those told about it just a few months ago. That's the "context" of the video. The section shown is absolutely appropriate to that objective. Showing the whole video does not remove the fact that audience members responded inappropriately to that section of her story.
How much more context can one give here? Blame other media outlets (including Fox News, although they certainly weren't the only ones carrying it) for presenting it out of context, but you can't blame Andrew Breitbart for doing so.
