The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette today carried another in a series of letters to the editor asserting that columnist Gene Lyons had erred in writing about Glenn Beck’s promotion of the smear of Shirley Sherrod. The nutjobs want an apology, by damn.
The letter writers — all of them — are wrong. I don’t know why the D-G is running false statements about one of their columnists. The point they miss is that an absence of Beck rants on TV about Sherrod does not mean he didn’t rant about her in other media before admitting his error.
Lyons explains it fully here in his Salon column.
[On TV] Beck said a fair-minded journalist like himself wouldn’t have broadcast the video clip of Sherrod because “context matters.”
Hence the barrage of furious e-mails from Beck’s credulous followers. Why, far from piling on Shirley Sherrod, he’d stood up for what the old Superman TV show called “truth, justice and the American Way.” Unlike me, Beck deals in facts, not innuendoes and lies.
Yeah right.
Alas, the fact is that Beck had already aired snippets of Breitbart’s tape on his radio program — out-of-context renderings of what was already out of context. Don’t believe me? You can still hear the fool thing on Beck’s website, or alternatively at Media Matters.
Don’t bother to send the corrective should you know any of the nutjobs. The multiple letters in the D-G prove they must be right. Facts? Who needs facts?