Racism and Discrimination Have Cost America $16 Trillion

It's not news at this point that Fox News doesn't have much regard for its audience, but it's still a little surprising sometimes when the network chooses to show its own ignorance and racial bias in a super blatant way.

Take last week's attack on Susan Rice, Domestic Policy Advisor for Joe Biden and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. In a speech she gave at a National Action Network convention on Wednesday, Rice said racism and discrimination have cost the U.S. $16 trillion.

Such a wild claim that can't possibly be true, right?! Fox News jumped on the speech, allowing social media trolls and conservative pundits to be the focus of a story on Rice's statement. Its headline—that social media users "roasted" Rice—contained plenty of Twitter embeds of folks wondering how Rice reconfigured the whole U.S. economy for her seemingly insane figure.

The problem with that? Rice didn't come up with that figure; a wide-ranging study from Citigroup did, as Rice herself pointed out in a tweet after the speech:

The study isn't even new—it was released in 2020 and received lots of media attention from outlets including Marketplace, Bloomberg and CNN. Not only does the $16 trillion figure only account for this century, but according to Citi, if we did a better job against discrimination, we could add $5 trillion to the economy.

Guess which media outlet didn't report on that study in 2020? Fox News.

The Fox News story, written by self-described "Fox News chick," associate producer Lindsay Kornick, feels like one of those pieces assigned to a low-level employee who must write to the inflammatory headline and ignore that Rice was citing a well-publicized study and not just making up the figure off the top of her head. It takes about 11 paragraphs and multiple embedded links to mention the study in Kornick's article (we use the word generously here), as if a late-in-the-process Google search revealed an uncomfortable angle that needed to be mentioned, but deep, deep down in the story past the point where any Fox News reader would scroll. The poorly done story also appears on Yahoo! News and trash sites like Breitbart.

Well done, Fox News. We were beginning to forget how incompetent your news coverage continues to be; it never hurts to be reminded once again.

More From LEVEL:

• Racism and Poverty Are Silent Killers in America. Literally.
• You’ll Never Guess Which Race Is Most Likely to Be Audited By the IRS
• The Results Are In: The Racial Reckoning at Corporations Was a Bunch of B.S.