Shirley Sherrod, the former Agriculture Department Georgia Director of Rural Development, says she is a victim. A victim of poor reporting and, as she contends, clear bias and racist coverage from both Andrew Breitbart and Fox News.

“When you look at their reporting, this is just another way of seeing that they are (racist),” Sherrod told me about Fox in a lengthy interview Tuesday night. “But I have seen that before now. I saw their reporting as biased during the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration.”

How long before they go from “supporting” to attacking her again? Answer: not long.
Breitbart is back at it, again accusing Sherrod of being a racist, using snippets of the very same video, her March 27 speech before a Georgia NAACP chapter, to smear her again.

Sherrod also told Media Matters how her firing unfolded:
But after Breitbart posted the video clip, Sherrod said the lack of context and explanation sparked anger against her. She said she found out about the clip when someone e-mailed a link to her and asked about it.

“I couldn’t believe it. I found this out when someone sent me (a link to) the tape, people who follow him, who put it out there,” Sherrod said about Breitbart. “I got crank calls right away. Someone sent me an e-mail and link and said ‘shame on you’ and other stuff. I was sitting in a meeting and I was really upset.

“I texted back that they were so wrong and that they need to know the message and they got it wrong.” Sherrod said Cheryl Cook, USDA deputy undersecretary, called her Monday and said she had to be on administrative leave.”

She adds: “People were calling and writing the Department of Agriculture in Athens, Ga., and Washington to tell them about it. That I needed to be fired. That a racist like me had no business working for the department. That is the way they intimidate people and it worked.”

By the end of the day Monday, she was forced to resign.
Sherrod, 62, said her first reaction was shock that, after a career working for civil rights and as the daughter of a father murdered by racists, she would be seen in such a terrible light.

“To have people say that I was such a racist was unbelievable,” she said of the fallout from the video and Fox coverage. “My whole life, if you look into what I have done, my father was murdered in 1965. If you look at all of us, we all hurt with that and we got involved into the movement and channeled our effort into good, instead of hating.

“I am getting hate calls and e-mails at this point. I got one call last night at my house at 12:30 a.m. that said ‘you lost your job, good for you’ and ‘bitch’ There are people out there who will believe that I am a racist person, even though the story is getting out there.”

And she said neither Breitbart (who she’d never heard of) nor anyone at Fox News ever contacted her to get her side of the story before running with Breitbarts smear. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t called at all…

“Not before they reported it,” she said of Fox’s negligence. “They have called me today and initially I had said yes (to an interview), but I thought about it and I did not think they intended to be fair in their reporting. They are going to say what they want to say regardless of what I say.”

She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage.