Social Media Doesn't Auto-Correct?

I've heard this time and again from people loyal to the freedom of social media - "A self-editing mechanism exists naturally in the blogosphere... Bloggers correct each other almost instantaneously." I wonder if Shirley Sherrod would agree.

In case you don't have a news-loving boyfriend to force all the cable news programs on you (MSNBC, Fox News, CNN), here's the background: Andrew Breitbart has a conservative blog, Big Government. He posted a video showing a speech Shirley Sherrod gave to the NAACP. As a result of this video and the attention it garnered, yesterday Sherrod was asked to resign.

In the speech, (**note to any speechwriters out there, your words can travel FAR!) Sherrod tells a story about how she decided to deal with a white farmer given the needs of local black farmers. What the video on the blog didn't show was her conclusion that both white and black farmers needed help. The story exploded into a reverse racism breaking news on all channels. In the end, the full video came out from the NAACP, along with an apology from the NAACP. The full video shows that Sherrod used the story to illustrate how she had learned from the event (in 1986) that both black and white farmers needed help. That it was a poverty issue that all suffered from.

What's more interesting is that the blogger, Andrew Breitbart, admits he didn't do it to expose Sherrod but instead to incriminate the NAACP for holding racist events. In the end, Sherrod is the one who paid the price.

Breitbart told CNN's "John King USA" on Tuesday that releasing the video was "not about Shirley Sherrod."

"This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party, and this is showing racism at an NAACP event," he said. "I did not ask for Shirley Sherrod to be fired." (Source)

So even though a blog and online video outed her, why didn't another blog and the full video come to her rescue?? Where was the auto-correct?

Now Sherrod has lost her job and her reputation over something someone posted. Besides the insanity of this event on its own, what about the bigger picture? You think things like this will ruin social media? Forcing people to list sources on blogs? Or is this just the new name of the game and we all need to have personal listeners to make sure we auto-correct our own stories before they get us fired?

It was a painful yet fascinating evening watching this story unfold so I had to share.