Shirley Sherrod.  Talk about a ‘teaching moment!!’  Students of media, communications, political science, race relations, business, human behavior, and more should and will be studying the case of Shirley Sherrod for years to come.  Can you imagine a more vivid snapshot of the dynamics of our time?

When it comes to quoting someone out of context (and the consequences of doing so), this one takes the cake.  When ‘fair and balanced’ Fox chose not to read past the beginning of Ms. Sherrod’s speech, it set off a domino effect of firestorms across the media, to NAACP, and even up to the White House. Et tu Brute!  Finally, CNN – often written off as sissies for trying to stay in the middle – took the time to read the entire speech and lo and behold discovered not only is this woman not a racist, she has acted with extraordinary compassion toward her fellow man, regardless of race. 

We have long since moved away from a time when people got things as right as they could before they took them to market….be it a product or a news story.  We live in a time of continuous improvement.  So, if the iPhone 4 isn’t quite right (and it’s not because you don’t know how to hold it), what the heck, they just re-engineer it, tell you they might give you a free rubber protector (if the store has any in stock), and blithely go along their merry way.  We consumers have become lab rats, testing products rather than getting products with the kinks already worked out.  It’s all part of the rush to market.

Same with news.  If the story isn’t right, no matter.  We’ll catch that in the next cycle.  Key is to get it up first.

Oh really?  Remember the networks declaring Gore won the presidency?  And what about Ms. Sherrod?

The rush to be first so egregiously misrepresented her words and her life that it may be time for the media to consider how  important being first really is.  It’s one thing to run a phony story about a celebrity’s diet or botox or supposed flings in a supermarket tabloid.  But the consequences of the Shirley Sherrod debacle deserve our close scrutiny.

So maybe we need to ask ourselves not if the product, ad, or story is absolutely perfect. Those days are for sure gone.  But what about, are we confident that it works, lives up to what we’ve said about it, and – in the case of a story – is fair and accurate?