Shirley Sherrod has gotten apologies from the Obama administration, the NAACP and even Bill O’ Riley.  The Sunday morning talk shows predictably lamented the situation. and pointed fingers at the racist propagandist Andrew Breitbart.

But the networks that ran the footage all day – until CNN finally decided to do some fact-checking – have yet to formally apologize to Sherrod or to their own viewers for presenting a completely bogus, doctored video as news.

A reporter who came back to the TV station or newspaper newsroom  with a story and said ‘ I can’t tell you where I got this or who edited it,”  wouldn’t last long.

But an Internet blogger with a known political agenda, who has been caught using doctored video in the past? No problem – it goes straight to the airwaves or page one.

The old adage “if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is,” has been replaced by “who cares if its true? this is great stuff!”

The media’s inability to own up to its role in the debacle means they will just keep blaming others instead of doing what only they can do, which is to  subject  an unsourced video  or story to same scrutiny that they would give to one produced by their own staff, and to fight everyday to uphold journalistic standards during a time of declining staff and revenue and professionalism.

To this day, virtually none of the networks or major newspapers who breathlessly pushed the “ACORN pimp” story have run a correction, or posted the uncut video which has been available for months on the California attorney general’s website.  Since ACORN is dead and buried, the media decided to bury its mistakes along with it, and hope no one notices.  They continue to whistle past the graveyard and live with the illusion that their credibility has not suffered a significant blow.

This unwillingness of the MSM to hold itself accountable means they will be duped again in the not too distant future by Breitbart or someone else  with another “too good to be true”  story or video that just happens to line up neatly with the most racist and irrational assumptions a certain segment of the population holds.

Ironically, this segment of the population hates the MSM as much as they hate  Mexican immigrants, the NAACP, or a black president, and no amount of pandering will ever change that. This being an election year means its a guarantee we’ll see another Sherrod type case in the media before the year is out. The MSM will get fooled again.

After declaring the war in Afghanistan to be  ”a war of Obama’s choosing,” RNC Chairman Michael Steele appears to have again foiled his critics by surviving yet another round of calls by Republican party apparatchiks for his ouster.

Calling on Michael Steele to resign has become a recurring theme almost since the day he was elected to give the Republican party a veneer of diversity.

This time, during a Connecticut fundraiser for Senate candidate Linda McMahon, Steele can be heard claiming that Afghanistan War, begun by George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks, “was not something the U.S. has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”

Its a fact that Bush had no strategy for the war, and took resources away from Afghanistan to conduct his military adventure in Iraq, but Steele almost sounded like he was calling on Obama to rethink Afghanistan.

“if [Obama] is such a student of history,”Steele  during the backyard shindig, “he has not understood that …that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?”

William Kristol, executive editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, got out front as the first person to call on Steele to resign (again.)

“I ask you to consider, over this July 4 weekend, doing an act of service for the country you love: Resign as chairman of the Republican party,” Kristol wrote in an open letter to Steele.

Let’s never forget that Kristol and his neo-con cohorts at Project for a New American Century are responsible for the deaths of thousands of US soldiers and millions of Iraqis because of their campaign of lies that under-pinned the Iraq war.

Kristol does not seem to be aware that even many Republican’s don’t care what he thinks, and that Steele actually has more credibility at the moment than he does. Liz Cheney, another discredited neo-con holdout, has also called on Steele to resign.  Thanks to low caliber of his critics, Steele seems likely to survive as chairman until the next call for his resignation.