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On her MSNBC show on July 20, Rachel Maddow lambasted Fox News over its race baiting campaigns, including its current attack on USDA staffer, Shirley Sherrod, who was fired, in part, because Fox aired video that had been deceptively edited to appear to depict Sherrod admitting she discriminated against white people. (See Maddow’s detailed indictment against Fox’s racist coverage in the video above and transcript below — and note that we had published a similar charge against Fox earlier that day, even before the truth about the Sherrod video had come out.)

Last night Bill O’Reilly offered a tepid apology to Sherrod, admitting that he should have listened to her entire speech before judging her to be a racist — he couldn’t resist adding a caveat, of course. “If a white public servant referenced ‘his own kind’ or ‘one of his own’ when speaking about an African American,” O’Reilly claimed, “that white person would be fired on the spot.”

O’Reilly went on to answer Maddow’s attack on his network’s racist editorial policies — first he played a segment of her show in which she said: “Just like the fake ACORN controversy, Fox News knows it has a role in this dance. That’s not new. That’s not even interesting about this scandal. Fox does what Fox does.”

O’Reilly responded: “Which is kick your network’s butt every single night, madam.”

Got that? He didn’t deny Fox News’ racist attacks, but rather acknowledged that race baiting produces ratings, and that counts more than accuracy — forget about fairness and balance.

Transcript:

RACHEL MADDOW: What is not really that interesting about this situation is the fact that Fox News is doing this. This is what Fox News does. This how they are different from other news organizations. This is why the White House argued months ago that Fox should be treated as a media organization but not as a normal news organization, because they don’t treat news the way a normal news organization treats news.

Just like the fake ACORN controversy, Fox News knows it has a role in this dance. That’s not new. That’s not even interesting about this scandal. Fox does what Fox does. That is dog bites man. That is not interesting.

What is interesting about this story is that the Obama administration inexplicably keeps falling for it.

Today Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack acknowledged that he asked for and accepted Shirley Sherrod’s after this supposed controversy came to light on Fox News. But apparently before anyone but Fox News and a conservative website got their say about what actually happened here.

Dear White House, dear administration: believing conservative spin about what’s so wrong with you and then giving into that spin is not an effective defense against that spin. Just buying it and apologizing for it, and doing whatever they want you to do doesn’t make the problem of them lying about you go away. In fact, it makes it worse.

After Fox News set its sights on Obama administration official Van Jones, Van Jones was very quickly booted out of his job.

After Fox News went on this fake crusade against ACORN, the Obama administration cut all ties with the group, didn’t even bother to mount a defense or wait until they had been investigated properly — just let Fox News do it. They pushed an effort to de-fund ACORN.

And now, after Fox News totally misrepresented USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, she’s cut loose as well — before the story can even make it into the mainstream media.

If you keep falling for this sort of stunt, you are encouraging them. You are feeding a dog from the table and thereby encouraging that dog to beg at the table.

After all the damage was already done today — after Fox News managed to force out Shirley Sherrod with a totally out of context smear job that made white people feel aggrieved about racism in a way that helps Fox News’ politics, here’s how Fox News decided to cover the end of this story:

FOX NEWS REPORTER on video: Did the White House essentially railroad an innocent woman in this because they are on edge themselves about the Van Jones controversy, the [New] Black Party Panthers case and other controversies.

MADDOW: “She was railroaded!” Given how the Obama administration has reacted to previous cooked-up campaigns by Fox News and conservative activists, it was not impossible to see this coming So I say again tonight, as I said back in April, the huge tide of negative publicity that followed these video tapes and the coverage they got on Fox wall-to-wall was a dishonest political stunt that bears no resemblance to journalism and no resemblance to the actual facts of what happened. But it worked. Means be damned, in the end it worked.

Like I said in April, who do you think is next on their list? I asked it months ago, and I’m asking it again now: Who’s next?