Although I expressed some disappointment last night toward Andrew Breitbart over his handling of the Shirley Sherrod video, I can certainly understand how the situation got like this.

By Breitbart’s own account on CNN this afternoon, he only received during the weekend the two videos that he posted on Monday, although he’s apparently known about them since March. So Breitbart gets these two videos, and now he has a choice to make: post them immediately, or wait for the fuller context, seeing as how there was no way Breitbart could not have known there was more to the story. And therein lies the catch-22 of journalism, particularly in a corporate environment. As a journalist, you want to make sure that you have all the facts, or else your reputation, and that of your employer, will suffer. But as an employee of a media organization  – or even as its proprietor, as Breitbart is with Big Government – you’re under pressure to produce the big scoop. With big scoops comes big subscribership, and thus big money.

Breitbart has these two videos, but unless he’s has an exclusivity agreement with the whistleblower who gave them to Breitbart, he has no time to sit on them. If he does, he risks his source simply sending the videos to another media organization, who will then get the scoop, the readers, and the money.

It’s a real problem, and it’s one that nobody really discusses. Yet, we see it all time, particularly with emergency situations like natural disasters and terrorist attacks (or attempted terrorist attacks). Faced with pressure to get the scoop first, media organizations and journalists have opted to present what they know at that very moment, even if what is said or written ends up being completely contradicted at some later point by fully revealed facts or context. However, very rarely is any newspaper or network called out for these mistakes in reporting. Indeed, the era of the correction is dead.

The situation is really no different with the new media. We bloggers want our sites to become popular, too. Particularly for political bloggers, original and thought-provoking writing is just not always enough to propel you to the top. Breitbart, for example, has become a well known name because of his ability to continually produce these exclusive, hard-hitting stories.

The difference is that before now, his scoops have been incredibly well documented. For his reveal on the Left’s playing of the race card, proving the non-existent barrage of n-word supposedly aimed at Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) and Rep. John Lewis (D-AL), he was able to find two videos of the same scene to successfully make his case. The same is true of his collaboration with James O’Keefe for the census and ACORN exposés, which have both provided multiple levels of documentation.

This was different. The first video has title graphics that introduced only Shirley Sherrod and her comments, and not the NAACP audience’s joyful laughter, which probably had the side effect (in the eyes of the viewers) of making the subject of the video her, and not the NAACP. He also chose to use the very spreadable platform of YouTube to host them. This likely ensured that many viewers who watched the two videos saw just the videos, and their introduction of Sherrod as making racist comments, and not his write-up explaining how he wanted to highlight the NAACP’s actions. This is especially true if when viewed in isolation, on the YouTube page, or in an embed from another site.

Speaking of embeds and referrals from other sites, Fox News, Fox Nation and Infowars all seemed to have missed Breitbart’s memo about how it was about the NAACP, and not about Sherrod. It’s not Breitbart’s fault that they didn’t seek out his rationale for posting these videos, but their more than 53,000 views account for a huge chunk of viewers who saw the video without both the proper context and proper explanation. And that’s not counting any direct visits to the video.

So the real problem here was not the decision to truncate the video, but how it was introduced, as well as a failure to foresee how many people would view it as being about Sherrod, instead of the NAACP, as intended. Again, we return to the pressure of working in a fast-paced media. Unless Breitbart drafts exclusivity agreements with his sources, he doesn’t have a lot of time to make a scoop. In this case, a rush to put up the video would mean that it wasn’t fully edited for clarity. I’m not sure who created the introduction graphics in video one, but it doesn’t really matter. The decision to either write them that way, or not edit them, and then to release the video to one of the most easily embeddable video platforms, was sloppy.

I understand that the pressure of the media environment meant that Breitbart couldn’t wait for the full video. I get that. And Breitbart doesn’t have the power to make people see that these excerpts were obviously not the whole video. But there were steps that he could have taken that would have prevented many people from misinterpreting the video, specifically where the introduction graphics were concerned. He could have explained his purpose for posting the video at the beginning, so more people would have taken notice of Sherrod’s audience, rather than Sherrod herself. He also should have noted that it was just an excerpt, so that it was perfectly clear for the more slow among us (like Sec. Tom Vilsack) that there was more context, and that more care should have been taken in an investigation. If he had make edits like that, this whole scenario could have turned out a lot differently.

Of course, Breitbart would still be countering attacks from the media, just as he always has. But rather than having to explain his intention behind posting the videos, and how he didn’t want Sherrod fired, he could be talking more about the NAACP’s double standards on racism. Instead, the narrative is Andrew Breitbart, the man who takes comments out of context.

I think Breitbart will learn from this. His is a necessary role, to combat the liberal media and government corruption, and it’s one that suits him very well. I certainly know that future work from him will be of the exceptional quality we’ve seen in the past.