The Fargo Forum published NDHRC’s letter to the editor on May 18.
The Board of Directors of the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition commends The Forum’s excellent follow-up story to Valley News Live’s incendiary and baseless report about tuberculosis in the refugee community.
Readers can consult the original Forum story (May 18) for a line-by-line refutation of the shoddy and context-less reporting done by Valley News Live. The Forum’s Adrian Glass-Moore does his job and consults actual, named experts in the region to provide a much less sensational — and fact-based — report.
Beyond this single story, however, is the fact that Valley News Live has exhibited a disturbing pattern of hate-mongering — using immigrants and refugees in our area as the targets of easy, dubious stories that drive clicks, views, and hatred amongst their viewers. Most disturbing is that this instigation causes fear in our fellow community members, our hard-working neighbors who would prefer to concern themselves with making better lives for themselves, their families, and their neighborhoods.
NDHRC stands together with our immigrant and refugee neighbors in the face of these sweeps week theatrics. We are better than this.