The journalists at MSNBC sure know how to celebrate America’s Independence Day, don’t they? It was nine years ago on Thursday that then-MSNBC host Melissa Harris Perry decided to trash the U.S. going into the Fourth of July holiday, reminding everyone of the country's “imperialism, the genocide, the slavery.”
On the eponymous July 1, 2012 program, she delivered “my footnote on the Fourth of July”:
The land on which they [the Founders] formed this Union was stolen. The hands with which they built this nation were enslaved. The women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class. But all of this is our story. Each of us benefits from the residuals of oppression and each of success harmed by the realities of inequality. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we`ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it's ours, all of it. The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.
What is it with MSNBC hosts? Going into Memorial Day weekend, the network’s Chris Hayes, also in 2012, complained that he was uncomfortable" in calling America's fallen military members "heroes." Hayes worried that doing so is "rhetorically proximate" to justifications for more war.
For more examples from our FLASHBACK series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
