The forced resignation of a minor U.S. Agriculture Department official this week and the fallout that ensued painted a grim picture of the state of the media and the political culture of this country.

Shirley Sherrod quickly was told to resign by Agriculture Department officials after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted an edited video of a speech she made in March to a Georgia NAACP chapter in which she tells the audience that she gave less than “the full force of what I could do” to help a white farmer save his farm 24 years ago when she worked for a nonprofit group.

Cable news outlets picked up the story, chattering practically nonstop about nearly every aspect of the situation they could imagine.

A full version of the speech made available after the media circus had reached an almost mouth-foaming level made it clear that Sherrod was talking about her personal journey to overcome her own prejudice. The video clip posted online and repeated ad nauseam on cable TV held no hint of the larger context of the speech, in which Sherrod went on to say that she did help the farmer recover financially and took the episode as a lesson that her real mission was to help poor people, regardless of their race.

There’s a lot that can be learned from this regrettable incident.

Rabid partisan bloggers can be entertaining and help people to reinforce their own perspectives. But the views they express must be taken with a grain of salt by readers and should not be repeated by mainstream media outlets without thorough investigation of their veracity.

This especially applies to the cable news networks, which in their frantic drive for ratings in the ever-more competitive 24-hour news cycle strive everyday to outdo each other in reporting outlandish stories aimed not at getting to the sense of truth about the human condition, but rather to attract as much attention as possible.

Breitbart and his ilk — both left and right — will continue to stir controversy with half-truths and outrageous claims. But serious news outlets have a responsibility to make a good-faith effort to get to the truth before reporting their outlandish assertions as fact.