Project for Excellence in Journalism

The Story of Shirley Sherrod: Reconstruction of a Media Mess

How One Video Triggered a Rush to Judgment

July 27, 2010

At one point during the furor over Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department staffer forced to resign after a video was posted on a conservative website, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the incident was a "teachable moment."

The episode may or may not serve to foster a broader national discussion on race. But it did open a window on how information and misinformation can careen through the current media ecosystem. Increasingly, supersonic speed predominates and reaction time shrinks. Online posts come in the middle of the night. Commentary and punditry add velocity to stories even before news reports have sorted them out. Partisan players are increasingly becoming news distributors with ties to cable channels and bloggers who follow them closely.

The case also illustrates how in this current media culture, someone can go from obscurity to household name status, and from ostracized to lionized, in a matter of 48 hours. In all, the Sherrod story was the second-biggest topic in the mainstream press last week.

Toward the end of the week, the story began morphing into a broader analysis of race in America, the behavior of the media and the apportioning of blame among parties ranging from the Obama administration to the Fox News Channel.

View a point-by-point chronology from Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism at journalism.org. The analysis traces how the story evolved and played out in the media in that frantic period between the July 19 release of the video and the July 21 apologies to Sherrod from Gibbs and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack as well as Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.