Conservative blogger — Republican and a Tea Party supporter — Andrew Breitbart posted a heavily edited video of a black USDA executive, Shirley Sherrod, making a “racist comment.”

Without so much as a phone call asking for an explanation, she was fired by the Obama administration.

It turns out Breitbart edited the full talk from which the snippet came, and thus totally distorted her comment.

The news media, especially “the Unfair and Unbalanced” Fox News ran the story as an example of black racism.

The NAACP even condemned her for saying that.

As it turns out, 24 years ago, she was giving an example of how unfair it is to use race when relating to people and how badly she felt, even though, in fact, she helped the white farmer, Roger Spooner, save his Georgia farm — he has come public this week at age 86 in her defense.

Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack and President Obama apologized and told her she could come back to USDA. Nice gesture, but it comes after an incredible knee-jerk reaction.

This whole thing was a blog lynching. It is just the tip of the iceberg for an increasingly brutal and irresponsible “new media,” such as bloggers, YouTubers, ambush journalists working for political causes — such as the ACORN fake prostitute and pimp incident also perpetrated by conservative bloggers — and other new parallel sources of opinion and “news.”

It’s okay and exciting to have so much diversity in media. However, the problem comes when so-called respectable outlets such as Fox News become the legitimizers who give credibility to this crap.

Of course, as some analysts have commented, having a news empire owned and controlled by a foreign interest, such as the Rupert Murdoch clan is at best troubling and at worst a national security threat. In most countries it would be viewed as the interference of a foreign power in the internal affairs of the nation.

In any case, the Sherrod incident is an alarming example of the power and irresponsibility of new media and of how desperate conservatives are to instigate tension and to use race as a match to light a political torch.

It may backfire and I, for one, hope the news media, including Fox News, will find a new sense of propriety and accuracy. If we only have yellow journalism, we are doomed.

Once upon a time, U.S. journalism was all-political. Most newspapers where totally biased to one or the other party, faction or cause. Moguls, who manipulated public opinion, could even start wars — the Spanish American War, to be precise. Yellow journalism — there was a little buck-tooth Japanese or Asian character used in cartoons, which were totally racist. This is where the “yellow” comes from. Are we going to start seeing Fox run cartoons with little black characters with pig tails eating chicken and watermelon sometime soon?

Maybe we are going back to that era, which would be a shame.

I believe the media — including the left media — should not be used as a mechanism for inflaming national divisions such as race. We know where that leads: undermining national moral character, discrediting the U.S. in the eyes of the world, violence, division and hatred.

If the right-wing bloggers want to go there, so be it, but there should be a serious backlash from the majority of Americans. Maybe a media advertiser boycott would be a good lesson?

Where will we get good, accurate and fair analyses if this happens more and more?

How can citizens and voters make good decisions if they have contaminated information passing for truth?