NYTs Half-baked "Investigation" Of Black Farmer's Settlement: Another Racist MSM Hatched Job

Though Andrew Breitbart has been dead a year, his rancid brand of hate-mongering slander is alive and well.

Its latest rotten pustule burst upon the face of the New York Times in a 5,000-word piece by Sharon LaFraniere, with an assist from self-described conservative blogger Dave Weigel at Slate.com, a web site owned by the Washington Post. The inflammatory title of the NYT piece says it all – “US Opens Spigot After Farmers Claim Discrimination.”

Waiting in line

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La Franiere depicts a fantasy world in which Black hucksters are enrolling thousands of African-Americans – many of whom were never farmers or even the heirs of farmers – in an apparently successful discrimination suit against the federal government.

The Times reporter and her ‘researchers’ drone on without the bother of a single sentence describing the practices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is being sued for. She and the Times apparently consider irrelevant the egregious and well-documented misconduct of USDA bureaucrats and staffers, county supervisors, local committees and others.

According to USDA’s own admission, they denied and actively blocked the flow of credit, information, loans and resources to Black farmers, leading to financial and business hardships and to a rate of dispossession of Black landowners that far exceeded the numbers of Whites who lost their farms.

One of many resources the NY Times might have availed itself of is Pete Daniels, author of “Dispossession: Discrimination Against African-American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights.”

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African-American farmers fell by 93 percent – far higher than the loss of White farmers. During the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s, local USDA officials purposefully pursued the dispossession of Black landowners who in any way aided or took part in the movement. MOREHERE