There is something deeply amusing about a publicly funded U.S. news outlet employing a reporter who does not seem to care all that much for the United States.
On Monday, just a few days after President Trump delivered a necessary and refreshingly on-point address before Mount Rushmore praising America’s virtues and institutions, PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor joined MSNBC to explain why the president’s speech was actually problematic.
“It seems like the president has really focused in on this culture war strategy,” she said of the address. “He’s digging in on race, poking at the worst parts of society.”
She added, “And the speech at Mount Rushmore, the thing that stuck with me was that he said the protesters, and he was really talking about Black Lives Matter activists who have been in all 50 states, including red states, they were trying to erase our history and erase the values of America and called the Black Lives Matter movement and this protest movement we’re seeing across the country dangerous.”
The president spoke specifically Friday evening of the rioters who targeted statues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and famed abolitionist Hans Christian Heg. He never once referred to Black Lives Matter (or the Confederacy, for that matter). The president also did not disparage social and racial justice, per se, but instead targeted the ultra-racialist, weaponized version of “woke” popularized by the likes of author and media darling Robin DiAngelo. That Alcindor heard “Black Lives Matter” when the president talked about rioters and the wanton destruction of monuments to legitimate heroes says more about her than anything else.
“What the president is doing is positing himself as against this idea there should be a rethinking of American history,” Alcindor continued Monday. “He said in that speech, at Mount Rushmore, under the statue of two slave owners, under Theodore Roosevelt, who was pushing for the expansion in the West, including the desecration of Native lands. He’s saying we can’t see the facts of our founders and seek to do away with this myth of America that everyone on July 4 that everyone was created, treated equally. That’s not true.”
Remember: Alcindor and her colleagues bill her as a hard news reporter. If this is what she considers hard news reporting, I would love to see what passes for commentary in her world.
She added Monday morning: “The president is looking at this movement and saying, ‘what I’m going to do is not join them, be an ally of peaceful protesters, I’m going to tell people our history is the history they want to remember that is false.’ And to call slavery a flaw. It was not a flaw. It was a mistake that was the original sin of America.”
That is not all. Moments after Trump’s address wrapped Friday evening, Alcindor had similar commentary for MSNBC.
“We’re seeing a celebration of America’s independence on land that was stolen from Native Americans, and it’s over, and it’s being seen and overlooked by two presidents, they’re figures, rather, that owned slaves and a third president in Roosevelt who — who talked about going westward and oversaw the desecration of Native land,” she said.
She added: “[Trump’s] fitting in this history that is, in some ways, a Republican history about the idea they’re really looking at white resentment … President Trump wants to be on the side of the myth of America.”
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to PBS, pockets roughly $445 million annually from taxpayers. The U.S. Senate also allocated an additional $75 million to the CPB this year as part of a broader coronavirus relief package.
How about a compromise: If taxpayers are going to have to help underwrite PBS, they should at least have some say in whether it grants press credentials to oikophobic activists masquerading as “reporters.”
