Twitter Comes for CNN Over Its Father's Day Tweet

Leah Barkoukis | June 19, 2023 9:00 AM

CNN was slapped with a Community Note on Sunday for what it claimed about fatherlessness in the black community.

Sharing its Father’s Day-themed report, CNN summarized, “Black fathers are often portrayed as absent or distant, but that isn’t what most people experience, according to both data and Black dads themselves. Such biased portrayals are often based on who is telling the story.”

Readers added context to the story, pulling from The Annie E. Casey Foundation, an organization dedicated to strengthening families, on “Children in Single-parent Families by Race and Ethnicity” in the United States.

The chart showed that as of 2021, 64 percent of “black or African American” kids lived in single-parent families. The data were based on the “Population Reference Bureau, analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Supplementary Survey, 2001 Supplementary Survey, 2002 through 2019, [and] 2021 American Community Survey,” according to the Foundation’s website.

Black fathers are often portrayed as absent or distant, but that isn’t what most people experience, according to both data and Black dads themselves. Such biased portrayals are often based on who is telling the story. https://t.co/7Rtw2Bna9R
— CNN (@CNN) June 18, 2023

Everything you do and say is utterly predictable and oh-so-subtly racist in the typical manner of superior progressives: "everyone (?) says black men make terrible fathers but we're so inclusive and good we say otherwise" to hell with you @CNN https://t.co/8yhYfZku20
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) June 18, 2023

CNN used to be able to talk about uncomfortable data honestly. Now “science reporters” like @mnholcombe simply omit uncomfortable data, and instead cite decade-old self-reported surveys that they contort to confirm what they learned at Emory a few years ago. https://t.co/1WZddJzhXm
— Gregg Re (@gregg_re) June 18, 2023

Contrary to what the report claims, it's not just a narrative being delivered by television, movies, and news stories. Former President Barack Obama, who did not have a father in the house growing up, has been very outspoken about fatherlessness in America, sharply addressing the issue directly with the black community in a noteworthy 2008 speech as then-senator.

“Too many fathers are M.I.A, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes,” Obama said at the time. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

As The New York Times noted, "the speech was striking for its setting, and in how Mr. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, directly addressed one of the most sensitive topics in the African-American community: whether absent fathers bore responsibility for some of the intractable problems afflicting black Americans. Mr. Obama noted that 'more than half of all black children live in single-parent households,' a number that he said had doubled since his own childhood."