The media get bashed

LITTLE ROCK — At Wednesday afternoon’s briefing, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs delicately pointed out to the assembled reporters that their news organizations had also been too quick to accept at face value the video that sparked the Shirley Sherrod controversy.

This is important because it hints at frustration that the White House rarely voices publicly: that Obama administration officials are often forced to respond to stories ginned up by the right because other news organizations too readily give them credibility.

The key moment came when Gibbs was asked by a reporter if the moral of this story is “don’t trust the Internet.”

Gibbs replied that news organizations had asked the White House for a response to a 2 1 /2-minute video posted by conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, when the speech was more than 43 minutes.

“I had a lot of people asking for a response 1 to the 2 /2 minutes,” Gibbs said. “My guess is you heard from a lot of your editors saying, ‘Go get reaction to this story.’ ”

Gibbs then described the media process as: “You all see it, you all want reaction, we get reaction.” He lamented that news organizations then aired the controversial snippet, as well as the White House reaction based on that snippet, without seeking fuller context themselves.

Gibbs suggested that media organizations, too, should ask themselves if they handled this properly:

“I don’t think there’s anybody involved in that chain that wouldn’t think, from start to finish, that this shouldn’t have been handled differently.”

Translation: Maybe you all should stop using Breitbart as your assignment editor.

There’s no excusing the administration’s conduct on this story, as Gibbs himself said repeatedly. The administration both fell prey to and enabled the process Gibbs is complaining about. And in this case, news organizations did show appropriate skepticism about the Breitbart video.

But Gibbs did make an important larger point here: Big news organizations are far too willing to take their cues from people who are known to cook the facts on a regular basis. We should all keep this in mind the next time a Breitbart video floats to the surface.

This column was excerpted from Greg Sargent’s blog on domestic politics and debate in Congress.