Shirley you must be joking.

Glenn Beck had it right. On his program shortly after the Shirley Sherrod story changed directions, Beck told his audience about two words that can mean the world to understanding the news: “Context matters.”

Boy, was he right.

Sherrod, a US Department of Agriculture official, was forced to resign after a clip of her surfaced on the Internet making allegedly racist statements to an NAACP crowd in regards to her treatment of a white farmer decades earlier. The clip appeared on a conservative blog, BigGovernment.com on July 19 days after the NAACP asked the Tea Party movement to repudiate alleged racist members in its ranks.

Context matters.

Very quickly, the media grabbed hold of the story and ran with it. The story had racial conflict — the alleged mistreatment of an ordinary, blue-collar farmer at the hands of a government official. In short, it was a scandal, the type of scandal that the news enjoys reporting on as part of its role as a watchdog for the public. Very quickly, the NAACP denounced the statements and publicly repudiated Sherrod.

Here’s the portion of her speech that ran online at the outset of the story:

Except the problem that emerged was that the watchdog was barking up the wrong tree (sorry for the cliche). The clip that ran online and which ran across the media landscape like wildfire, was only a portion of the full speech. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, blogs started picking up the video from BigGovernment and begin to pass it around. However, “At least one blogger has doubts. In a 3:31 p.m. posting on the website First Things Elizabeth Scalia worries the Sherrod video clip might not tell the whole story: ‘I am uncomfortable with this ‘get’ by Breitbart,’ she writes. ‘I want to see the rest of the tape.’” The Sherrod story surfaced that evening on Fox News and on CNN. The PEJ noted that none of the major American news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) ran a story about Sherrod on their nightly news casts. However, before the end of the day, the USDA reacted, based on the 24-hour news cycle, and had Sherrod resign. Without taking a moment to gather all the facts, interview all sources in the controversy and get the relevant background information, the context to the story was lost. Very quickly, the Sherrod case turned into a media disaster.

It did so because the clip did not capture the entire context of her speech. Below is the full video of her speech:

Already, there has been much internal and external media evaluation of the Sherrod case. The Poynter Institute looked at the waves and undercurrents of the Shirley Sherrod case, how bloggers are just as squeamish as mainstream American outlets in discussing race and questioned whether a beat reporter covering the USDA would have noticed inconsistencies in the story before it got out of hand. The Project for Excellence in Journalism took a wide look at the media mess and charted how it went awry so quickly. Here’s what the PEJ had to say about the Sherrod case:

… it did open a window on how information and misinformation can careen through the current media ecosystem. Increasingly, supersonic speed predominates and reaction time shrinks. Online posts come in the middle of the night. Commentary and punditry add velocity to stories even before news reports have sorted them out. Partisan players are increasingly becoming news distributors with ties to cable channels and bloggers who follow them closely.

The case also illustrates how in this current media culture, someone can go from obscurity to household name status, and from ostracized to lionized, in a matter of 48 hours.

Anderson Cooper opened his July 21 program with a similar assessment. He called cable news, which he is a member of, part of the problem that created the mess. The political divisions in American media is another problem, he argued. Although Cooper was referring to the source of the original video, one of his final comments summed up the problems the Sherrod case exposed: it “is a classic example of what’s wrong with our national discourse.” As well, Cooper said, “truth matters.”

What the Sherrod case shows is just how much the responsibility of analyzing the level of truth and quality of information in news stories has shifted from the news outlet to the consumer (Couldry, Freedman & Phillips, 2010). That shift is just one of the many results of an Internet-based culture where raw information appears with little scrutiny before it lands before us to digest. As the pace of information speeds up, we are left with little time to check the veracity of reports. Too often, that means a news consumer places their trust in the information presented to them, or becomes so cynical that they trust nothing. Either way, the news or information consumer may be missing the context and truth to a story even though the Internet provides ways of testing and verifying information. Lee-Wright (2010) argued that “the technical tower of Babel that is the Internet can add context and clarification to that critical role [of informing ourselves], but there is little evidence that it can transform it, let alone supplant it (p. 85).” Merely having the tools at our disposal means little if we don’t know how to use it.

And in the case of Shirley Sherrod, few, if any, of those tools were actually used either by journalists, the parties interviewed for the story, the United States government or the news consumer. The Shirley Sherrod case is not a failure of the political system, but an epic failure of our system of information.

And that system has a short memory. So, in a few months time, will anyone remember what happened to Shirley Sherrod or the lessons of this mess?