Said a UC Berkeley professor who studied the matter in great depth, "I was so disgusted. It was simply buying the support of the Native Americans." How can Drum not understand, after all that, why the Agriculture Department didn't adopt stricter standards? It's as if progressives writing about Pigford are blind to the fact that plaintiffs' lawyers and identity-based interest groups exert influence in politics just like corporate interest groups, industry interest groups, defense contractors, and every other constituency that participates in lobbying the U.S. government. Not all claims of cynical racial politics are bogeymen dreamed up by bigoted conservatives.

Every powerful interest group has its excesses.

To mark the 30th anniversary of Washington Monthly, Nicholas Lemann wrote an essay in which he observed that the magazine's original mission was "figuring out how to make specific government policies and agencies work effectively to help ordinary people who need it." I have yet to see an article from a progressive or a liberal that takes a hard look at the excesses of Pigford and its successor cases and addresses how, in the future, government policies and agencies can more effectively help the ordinary people who need or desserve it without squandering money enriching people who don't, along with their lawyers. Speculating about the racist motives of Pigford critics is evidently a more urgent priority, judging from the coverage so far. Then again, it wouldn't shock me if Washington Monthly already has that article assigned.

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*The late polemicist's presence looms over the Pigford case because, before his death, he talked about it constantly. Since the New York Times story ran, his fans and the site that bears his name insist his obsession with the case has been vindicated. I'd agree to that narrow point: Breitbart was correct that Pigford and its successor settlements warranted far more scrutiny than they got from the media. At the same time, I can't blame journalists for ignoring Breitbart's claims. He'd already proved himself unreliable at that point in his career for reasons that everyone outside the conservative movement already understands. For the subset of conservative readers who don't understand, it's hugely important to your prospects that you try.

Here's the thing:

Everything opinion journalists comment on that we haven't reported ourselves involves a degree of trust. Sometimes when I'm trying to decide whether to approvingly cite another journalist's work, I imagine myself being cross-examined in an adversarial manner, and try to think if I could defend treating their work with the presumption that it is correct, even if it later turned out that they made an uncharacteristic mistake that I unwittingly passed on. (If I cited Jayson Blair you'd all laugh in my face, correct?) The New York Times isn't perfect, or free from bias, but they do their best to get the facts right, issue corrections, and even employ a public editor for an extra layer of accountability. I can defend citing them. Dan Foster of National Review isn't perfect. But I've read his work for a long time, know that he does his best to get everything right, and appreciate that he was willing to debate a critic of his Pigford piece in a neutral forum. I can defend citing him. Were I to run with a Breitbart scoop, an adversarial attorney could say, "Mr. Friedersdorf, isn't it true that the only time you wrote a column that treated a scoop published by Breitbart as if it was accurate you had to correct the record in a subsequent column? Isn't it also true that Breitbart misled his audience about you personally in a way that would've seriously damaged your career if anyone had believed him, that you alerted him to that fact, and that you complained bitterly when he wouldn't correct the record? Additionally, are you aware of the fact Breitbart.com published an article claiming that Lyndon Johnson drunkenly dropped a nuclear bomb on the United States, that they failed to correct that claim after it was publicly mocked, and that they didn't even correct it when the author of the piece disavowed it?"