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Insight News
May 10, 2021 - May 16, 2021
Vol. 48 No. 19• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com
The Big Lie as Journalism Murdock paper publishes “book” lie on Vice President Harris By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent On April 23, The New York Post published and then edited a story that claimed that a children’s book by Vice President Kamala Harris was given out to migrant children at the Mexican border as part of a “welcome kit” upon entering the U.S. Former New York Post writer Laura Italiano claims she was forced to write the story. “The Kamala Harris story — an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against — was my breaking point,” wrote Italiano on social on April 27. Increasingly, Murdock media properties, such as
Fox News, have relied more on contributors and fictional information rather than straight reporting focused on accurate knowable truth as demography in the U.S. changes. The non-factual information after the election of President Joe Biden has resulted in lawsuits for defamation — such as two lawsuits by Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. The companies are suing Murdoch’s Fox Corporation for billions in defamation and named Fox anchors Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro as defendants. Dominion Voting Systems sued Rudy Giuliani for $1.3 billion based on over 50 statements by Giuliani made at hearings, on social media, his podcast and on Fox News — where Giuliani claimed
Dominion Voting Systems “flipped” votes to facilitate President Biden’s win. President Biden won by over 7 million votes with several Republican controlled states certifying his election as legitimate. The headline in the article was headlined by the words “Kam on in.” The “news” story claimed that migrant children were being given “welcome” packets with a copy of the Vice President’s 2019 children’s book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere.” Daniel Dale, a fact checker at CNN, pointed out that The New York Post “temporarily deleted, and then edited and republished,” the debunked piece. An editor’s note at the bottom of the current version of the story now reads: “Editor’s note: The original version of
this article said migrant kids were getting Harris’ book in a welcome kit, but has been updated to note that only one known copy of the book was given to a child.” A CNN poll released on April 30 indicates that the “big lie” strategy is working on some Americans. The question “Did Biden Legitimately Win Enough Votes for The Presidency,” resulted in Republicans answering “no” 70 to 23 percent. Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent journalist for NNPA and the host of the podcast BURKEFILE. She is also a political strategist as Principal of Win Digital Media LLC. She may be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke
Vice President Kamala Harris
What the US can learn from Africa about slavery reparations By Kwasi Konadu John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Endowed Chair and Professor, Colgate University The House Judiciary Committee voted on April 14, 2021, to recommend the creation of a commission to study the possibility of paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved people in the United States. The measure, H.R. 40, would establish a 15-person commission to offer a “national apology” for slavery, study its long-term effects and submit recommendations to Congress on how to compensate African Americans. Any federal reparations bill faces long odds of being enacted due to Republican opposition, but this is the furthest this effort has advanced since a similar bill was first introduced over 30 years ago. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat from Texas, who introduced H.R. 40, called it a needed step on the “path to restorative justice.” As the U.S. debates reparations for descendants of U.S. slavery, looking to Africa might help clear a path forward, according to my research on African history and the African diaspora.
South Africa’s incomplete reparations In the U.S. and globally, arguments for reparations mostly revolve around financial restitution. But a closer examination of the actual reparations efforts illustrates the limits of programs solely focused on financial restitution. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and his ruling political party, the African National Congress, created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1995 upon coming to power. The commission investigated human rights crimes during nearly five decades of apartheid, the system of legislation that upheld segregationist laws and perpetrated racist violence. The commission also established a reparations program, recommending in its 2003 final report that victims of apartheid receive roughly US$3,500 over six years. But the commission stipulated that only those who had testified to the commission about apartheid’s injustices – about 21,000 people – could claim reparations. Some 3.5 million Black South Africans suffered under apartheid rule. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, issued the onetime $3,900 payments in 2003. South African governments
Alex Wong/Getty Images
Activists mark National Reparations Day in Washington, D.C., on July 1, 2019. have since made no additional payments to those who testified or other apartheid victims. Nor have any post-Mandela governments put the perpetrators of the apartheid system on trial. The power structure that upheld apartheid has remained largely undisturbed. South Africa is the world’s most unequal society, according to the World Bank.
Whites make up the majority of wealthy elites while half of the Black South African population lives in poverty. Dismissing the wider social and economic damage caused by apartheid – highincome inequality, unreturned lands seized by whites, poor community infrastructure – has kept millions who suffered violence from qualifying as victims. They may never see
reparations. Sierra Leone’s underfunded effort Around the same time that South Africa created its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the West African nation of Sierra Leone undertook a similar effort to confront the aftermath of its 10-year civil war. Sierra Leone’s
civil war, from 1991 to 2002, killed at least 50,000 people and displaced another 2 million. In 2004, its Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended reparation measures for survivors. It recommended pensions, free health care and education benefits for amputees, those severely wounded, those widowed by the war and survivors of sexual violence. Sierra Leone governments long ignored these recommendations, but in 2008 pressure from the country’s largest survivor organization, the Amputee and War-Wounded Association, and a $3.5 million grant from the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund restarted reparation efforts. Instead of implementing the TRC’s more comprehensive reparation measures, however, the Sierra Leone government in 2008 provided each of the 33,863 registered survivors a single $100 payment. The UN later provided some small payments, loans and vocational training to other survivors in subsequent years. After interviewing survivors of the Sierra Leone civil war, the nonprofit Peace Research Institute Frankfurt concluded in 2013 that Sierra
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