Pam Adams: Unlearned lessons, unchallenged lies predate Sherrod

Finally, it's safe to turn on a TV news show without having to endure a talking head asking an instant expert what lessons we've learned.

The Shirley Sherrod story is slipping to the bottom of the news barrel and with it another teachable moment in the never-ending non-conversation on race. Take race out of the deck, though, and we begin to see the Shirley Sherrod story demands much more than a national dialogue on race. It calls for a lesson on lies - the lies that take hold, the lies that don't and the lessons we don't want to learn.

We seem to have forgotten a few of the big lies in the swamp long before Andrew Breitbart jumped in with an edited video of Sherrod on his website, including:

We're getting Osama dead or alive.

Saddam's got his hands on weapons of mass destruction.

Death panels are coming for Granny.

Wall Street will regulate itself.

Oil companies will make sure off-shore drilling is safe for the environment. They'll regulate themselves.

Then comes a right-wing conservative blogger with a video snippet accusing a USDA official of black-on-white racism at a NAACP meeting. Before we can say Rush Limbaugh, the Agriculture secretary and the NAACP are condemning her remarks and she's forced from her government job. It's as if the boy cries wolf over and over again and we fall for it every time.

The pressure of keeping up with the instant, microwaved news of the blogosphere has emerged as a major culprit in this Breitbartian farce. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the NAACP and the president have mentioned, in one way or another, that the fast-paced media culture played a role in the fast-paced, but not fact-based, responses to Breitbart's initial post. This is one time the quick-moving media culture was equally responsible for the swift turn-around of Shirley Sherrod's instantly manufactured image.

It was the onslaught of a 24-7 cable TV news cycle that got much of the blame for the media spectacle that was the first O.J. Simpson trial. From O.J. to WMDs to Twitter, you'd think we'd be getting as good at instantly critiquing the lies as the new media masters are at selling them. The truth is they are hawking old lies in new clothes and it's worked so often for so long the type of media it's sold on doesn't matter. They work because we are trained to believe them. In that regard, the media is us.

Where is Osama? Saddam who? What WMDs? The WMD lies that led us from one war in Afghanistan to another in Iraq seem so quaint now that we are stuck in two wars we can't win and can't afford.

Valerie Plame seems so long ago. She was the Shirley Sherrod of the WMD lie. A former CIA agent, Plame was outed after her husband, Joe Wilson, wrote a New York Times piece claiming the Bush administration manipulated the evidence for invading Iraq.

Unlike Sherrod, Plame was in no in position to speak out for herself. There was no old farm couple alive and willing to offer themselves up as evidence of her husband's true motives when he tried to deliver the facts about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And it wasn't a blogger out to destroy his credibility. It was a card-carrying member of the so-called-liberal mainstream media.

The WMD lie could take hold because we live in a climate wrapped in the flag. Anyone who raises questions is unpatriotic - or worse, a socialist. That is a lie as old as the hills. Breitbart could dare to provoke a drive-by on the NAACP - and the NAACP could fall for it - not mainly because the NAACP had called on the tea party movement's leaders to repudiate racist elements in their ranks, but because stoking white fear of black equality has been one of the country's most useful lies since the days of slavery.

Over the course of a week's worth of interviews, it is intriguing how often Sherrod said she was deeply hurt by the whole affair and how rarely her interviewers grasped her pain. When the accusation is racism, we are supposed to be shocked, outraged, offended, defiant. Never just plain hurt. We are supposed to joust for winning and losing positions, not peace and conciliation.

Mission (not) accomplished.

Pam Adams is a columnist with the Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star. Her e-mail address is padams@pjstar.com.

The opinions in this column are not necessarily those of the newspaper.