NBC News on Monday raised eyebrows with a bizarre report seemingly intended to damage Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a native of the Yellowhammer State.
The report stated that McConnell’s “two great-great-grandfathers, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned a total of at least 14 slaves in Limestone County, Alabama.”
The outlet further decried that “all but two of [the slaves were] female.”
According to its own reporting, NBC News “discovered” this information when searching through ancestry and census records on McConnell after the Senate Republican leader recently came out against reparations, a policy proposal that has been and still is widely unpopular among the general American populace.
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, when none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea,” McConnell said in June, a day before a House subcommittee held a hearing on reparations. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.”
Now, NBC News is apparently suggesting McConnell exemplifies why there should be reparations.
“McConnell has opposed paying reparations to descendants of slaves, though census records show his family, like many others, benefited from their labor,” the subtitle stated.
Additionally, the outlet seems to be implying McConnell has engaged in some sort of coverup regarding the contrived controversy.
“No news articles were found in which McConnell has previously spoken of his ancestors being slave owners,” NBC News emphasized, also pointing to multiple supposed examples in McConnell’s memoir when he did not mention slavery.
McConnell was born Feb. 20, 1942, in Sheffield, Alabama. Before his immediate family moved from Athens, Alabama to Georgia when he was eight-years-old, generations of his family had lived in and around Limestone County. His paternal grandparents are buried in the Athens City Cemetery, for example.
The NBC News article drew immediate criticism from moderates and conservatives on social media for its clearly activist bent.
Even given the derangement gripping our current politics it’s still stunning to see a major news outlet write up something like this. https://t.co/aWQvHu1qUC via @nbcnews
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 9, 2019
However, in stark contrast, other national legacy media outlets have hailed the article on McConnell’s great-great-grandfathers.
Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
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