Huffington Post: Media's Failure to Report on Pigford Hurts Black Farmers

From the Huffington Post:

I’m writing this a little before sunrise at a hotel room in Jackson, Mississippi. I’m traveling with my family — my wife, three of our kids and two cats — and gathering facts and conducting interviews about the Pigford vs. Glickman settlement that was designed to remedy the decades of discrimination that black farmers in this country faced from their own government, specifically the USDA. The Pigford tale is one that the mainstream press has barely covered, so I’ve had no problem finding people close to the story who want to tell the world their side of it. My family has driven through four different states in the past 10 days, and I’ve videotaped more than five and a half fours of interviews, in addition to spending countless hours on the phone in both on and off the record conversations.

One thing that’s emerged from every conversation I’ve had is that America’s black farmers are this country’s unsung heroes. Farming is hard enough work on its own, but when you add the additional weight of fighting the government’s “good old boy” network that existed in many places, the resilience of the black farmers is amazing.

The dignity of the black farmers makes the mainstream media’s blanket of silence about Pigford especially offensive. A black reporter I spoke with attributed some of that to the subtle systemic racism that exists in the mainstream media, with a bias towards covering stories that affect or are about white folks. Too often, the press is able to pat itself on the back by dealing with stories about race in a surface way. They pretend that by calling the Tea Party or a Republican politician a racist, they’ve done their job and scored a victory for minorities. In fact, though, all those reports end up doing is casting heat but not light. They stir up racial tensions and let the press give themselves a pass for not actually digging into a story like Pigford.

Another thing that everyone seems to agree on about Pigford is that it’s a very complex story. It’s not something that can be explained easily between two commercial breaks or in a couple of soundbites. That being said, it’s fascinating — a long, winding trail of outright corruption and wholesale fraud weaving itself between complicated, passionate people on all sides who have struggled to do the right thing to remedy the plight of black farmers.

The story the press wants you to hear about Pigford is an overly simple one; it’s a settlement to remedy black farmers, and last week (over the racially tinged objections of a tiny group of House Republicans) the president signed the Pigford 2 extension that provides more than a billion dollars in funding for late filing farmers.

The problem with that explanation of Pigford is that it’s false on nearly every level.

I’ll be untangling Pigford in blogs here on The Huffington Post over the next several weeks, but you can start to see the underlying truth about Pigford if you stop and think about the optics. President Obama, Secretary Vilsack, Attorney General Holder and even lame duck Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) all called the Pigford 2 settlement a historic milestone.

So — where are the pictures?

Read the rest here.