{"id":28666,"date":"2023-09-21T11:57:05","date_gmt":"2023-09-21T18:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=28666"},"modified":"2023-09-21T11:57:05","modified_gmt":"2023-09-21T18:57:05","slug":"media-coverage-of-reparations-hearing-runs-from-bad-to-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/09\/21\/media-coverage-of-reparations-hearing-runs-from-bad-to-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"Media coverage of reparations hearing runs from bad to worse"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

News outlets miss the point, ignore the context, and can’t even do basic math.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By TIM REDMOND<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEPTEMBER 19, 2023 (48hills.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Board of Supes held a hearing on the final report of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, and already the media coverage\u00a0continues in its past pattern<\/a>: It\u2019s somewhere between missing the point, avoiding the context, and sometimes astonishing racism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sup. Shamann Walton has been leading the campaign for reparations. Photo by Ebbe roe Yovino Smith.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Associated Press, which prides itself on political objectivity,\u00a0went out of its way to quote a Republican leader<\/a>\u00a0in a city where nobody pays much attention to Republicans, who have little or no political relevance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Critics say the city\u2019s reparations plans are unconstitutional and would ruin the city financially. Richie Greenberg, who ran for mayor in June 2018 and received less than 3% of the vote, said in an email to the board that the reparations plan \u201cis unlawful, and pursuing the plan regardless of this fact is a clear and purposeful wasting of the city\u2019s taxpayers\u2019 money.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The guy got three percent of the vote, and now AP quotes him as if that creates \u201cbalanced\u201d reporting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was surprised that Justin Phillips, who has done a generally excellent job reporting on reparations, gave Greenberg as much attention as he did in his column this morning.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

NBC Bay Area reported that \u201cCash reparations draw controversy in San Francisco,<\/a>\u201d when the only real \u201ccontroversy\u201d is what the news media has stirred up. The hearing was moving and powerful, and all 11 members of the board, including its most conservative members, praised the committee, accepted the report, and said they wanted to see ways to implement more than 150 recommendations, only a small number of which involve cash payments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201ccontroversy\u201d NBC mentioned involved a statewide poll, not a San Francisco poll, which addressed only the issue of cash payments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It reminds me of the days when news outlets decided it was important to quote climate-change deniers so they could claim they were \u201cbalanced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u00a0read the full report here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It seems pretty clear that a lot or reporters didn\u2019t bother to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea that reparations are some sort of handout (check out the Fox News story that uses the word \u201cdole,\u201d<\/a> which refers to post-War Britain\u2019s welfare system) is fundamentally wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reparations are designed to repair the damage that the US\u2014and the state of California, and the City and County of San Francisco\u2014has done to Black people. Like tort law in the US, the idea is not to give people something free but to make them whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The press loves the $5 million figure, which sounds like such a big number. But let\u2019s put it in context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Black property owner who, say, had three or four parcels in the Fillmore in the 1950s, maybe an apartment building, a family home, a commercial building, and lost all of them to redevelopment (and got paid a fraction of their value) lost more than that property. They lost the ability to build generational wealth. Those parcels today would be worth tens of millions of dollars, which the owner\u2019s descendants could have used to start businesses, educate their kids, buy their own homes \u2026 you get the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How much would it cost to fix that historic injustice? Just a tiny fraction of the $47 trillion<\/a> that the rich have stolen from the poor in this country in the past 40 years\u2014and the vast, vast majority of those beneficiaries have been white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an even smaller fraction of the wealth generated from the exploitation of Black people since 1619.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s really a pretty small number. (Giving $5 million to every Black person in San Francisco would amount to less than one half of one percent of the wealth of the 700 richest people in the United States. There are 84 billionaires in San Francisco alone; do the math.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But none of that context is in any of the news stories I\u2019ve seen. It\u2019s a disgrace that in 2023 we are still having this argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walton told me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s unfortunate that rather than see the proven harm done to Black people in San Francisco and the opportunities to address he inequities caused by slavery and further exacerbated by racists and elitist policies, certain media outlets focus on continuing the division that slavery and the Jim Crow south created.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Oh, and if the AP is right, Mayor London Breed says that reparations \u201care best addressed on the national level.\u201d I\u2019m not even sure what to say.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Redmond<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Redmond has been a political and investigative reporter in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He spent much of that time as executive editor of the Bay Guardian. He is the founder of 48hills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

News outlets miss the point, ignore the context, and can’t even do basic math. By TIM REDMOND SEPTEMBER 19, 2023 (48hills.org) The Board of Supes held a hearing on the final report of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee, and already the media coverage\u00a0continues in its past pattern: It\u2019s somewhere… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[232],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28668,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28666\/revisions\/28668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}