The Media Research Center managed this year to restrain the meltdowns it has had in previous years over the establishment of Juneteenth as an official holiday, but Alex Christy did try to invoke it in a coverage complaint in a June 20 post:
PBS’s Christiane Amanpour likes to say that journalists should be “truthful, not neutral,” but a common theme of Amanpour and Company is that her commitment to the truth only goes one way. For Wednesday’s Juneteenth show, Amanpour claimed that Donald Trump’s presidency and the Supreme Court represent “hurdles” to racial equality, while her guest, Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director Bryan Stevenson, claimed that some states are making it illegal to learn about the history of racial injustice in America.
[…]Later in his reply, he recalled that “Now in Berlin, you can’t go 200 meters without seeing markers and stones placed next to the homes of people who were killed during the Holocaust. There’s a landscape that is trying to reckon with the horrors of that. Every student in Germany is required to study the Holocaust. You can’t graduate without that.”
Attempting to contrast that with America, he claimed, “But here in the United States, we have states passing laws trying to make it illegal, impermissible for people to study these histories, and that just speaks to the challenge that we face and so, we are in the middle of it, and we have a lot of work to do, which is why I am persuaded that we need an era of truth and justice, truth and repair, truth and restoration, truth telling about this history.”
That is false, and no matter how many times people like Stevenson repeat it, it will not suddenly become true. The progressive left does not own the legacy of abolitionism, just as Amanpour does not get to claim the mantle of truthfulness in journalism.
In fact, the entire point of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to rewrite black history courses in the state was to prohibit the teaching of certain things he didn’t like. the MRC, of course, ran to DeSantis’ defense, uncritically repeating his claims that he just wants real education and that the things he was banning were “woke” (whatever that means). But Christy doesn’t care about “truthfulness,” just narrative-advancing.