What if everything we said mattered?

Over the last several weeks the world has gotten another lesson in the power of loose lips on the Internet when Shirley Sherrod, a government official who spoke her truth in public, was vilified by the right wing, fired by the government and then supported and – finally – apologized to. The whole episode, which took a personal toll on Ms. Sherrod and political tolls on the conservative media, NAACP and the Obama administration, all started because one individual – an individual blogger – took a bit of film footage (not the whole clip) and circulated it with his own interpretation to the web. And people who wanted to believe his version of the truth paid attention – including the powerful conservative media - passed it on, supported him and created a total public relations debacle out of an incomplete piece of video.