The latest example of a wildly misleading headlines comes from a story in The Hill about what Fox News host Laura Ingraham said about reparations on her podcast.
The story itself is from The Daily Beast, which used a similarly deceptive headline.
The Beast: “Laura Ingraham Dismisses Reparations: ‘No Do-Overs…We Won, You Lost, That’s That’”
The Hill: “Ingraham dismisses reparations: ‘We won, you lost’”
As it turns out, what Ingraham actually said does not justify the headlines.
Ingraham discussed Thursday’s House hearing on reparations with Kentucky State University professor Wilford Reilly, who suggested offering reparations to African-Americans might lead to Native Americans asking for reparations of their own.
“I mean, obviously both white and black soldiers, frankly, took this country from the Indians — the first people,” Reilly said, according to the Hill.
Ingraham responded: “People would argue that the whole world, and I would, the whole world has been reshaped by people taking other people’s land. It’s called conquest.”
She added: “There was an argument, sometime — I think it was the 1980s. There was a quote, you won, we lost, that’s that. Describing world politics, we won, you lost, that’s that. That’s just the way it is.”
Ingraham was referring to a potential request from others for reparations, not African-Americans, on whom the current discussion is focused. These headlines seem to suggest Ingraham made those comments about slavery, which she was not. She specifically discussed “taking other people’s land” not bringing people against their will to another country to work as slaves.
But this is Ingraham, so the media takes free rein to smear her.
The reparations discussion has suddenly been brought up again — conveniently as the Democratic primary is heating up heading into a presidential election year — with the House Judiciary Committee holding a hearing to discuss the issue.
Former NFL safety Burgess Owens testified at this hearing that perhaps Democrats should be the ones who pay for reparations, since they are “the party that was part of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, that has killed over 40 percent of our black babies, 20 million of them.”
New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie complained on Twitter that the two witnesses called “have no apparent qualifications other than being black.” He sneered and then listed the qualifications of the people speaking on behalf of the Democrats, neglecting to point out that these so-called “experts” have failed to account for the unrealistic — and unconstitutional — expectations to hold people accountable for crimes they didn’t commit.
Prior to the hearing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed this concern, telling reporters he didn’t think reparations were a good idea.
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years — for whom none of us currently living are responsible — is a good idea,” McConnell said.
“We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, by electing an African American president,” he added.
Further, McConnell explained that “no one currently alive was responsible for [slavery].”