It's time to stand up to right-wing propaganda

President Obama comforts Amy Wilhite of Marblehead, Ohio, who spoke at the White House last month as the President discussed the new health-care reform law. Ms. Wilhite's daughter, Taylor, who has leukemia that is in remission and needs further care, accompanied her mother to Washington. CAROLYN KASTER / AP Enlarge

THE smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in U.S. politics. This is not a "teachable moment." It is a time for action.

The mainstream media and the Obama Administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story."

And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.

The administration's response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with "protecting" the President turned out to be the least protective approach of all.

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the President's inner circle.

President Obama complained on ABC's Good Morning America that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack "jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles." But it's his own apparatus that turned "this media culture" into a false god.

Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that "balance" demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of its attack lines.

Thus did Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on "the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party." Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Mr. Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the administration favors blacks over whites.

And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. "This doesn't have to do with the Black Panthers," she told the Web site Politico. "This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration."

Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration. He's a GOP activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.

Now Mr. Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being "motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law." This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If President Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.