China state media report 'US cancelling blacks' voting rights' in another blunder

China Radio International misinterprets a recent US Supreme Court Decision

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A screenshot of the original report, with the headline "A federal state of the United States cancels African American suffrage." Photo: Screenshot via China Radio International

Published: 4:25pm, 27 Jun 2013Updated: 6:21pm, 27 Jun 2013

Chinese state media embarrassed themselves on Wednesday - publishing an article that misinterpreted a recent United States Supreme Court decision as an “end to African-American suffrage”.

The article, entitled “A federal state of the United States cancels African-American suffrage,” ran on Wednesday afternoon on the website of China Radio International (CRI), a state-run news outlet. It claimed that US state Alabama’s Supreme Court had decided to “cancel several core clauses of the Voting Rights Act, [and that] all African Americans of [Alabama] would no longer possess the proper voting qualifications.” The article said this decision had caused an “uproar” in the United States, with both the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People as well as President Barack Obama expressing deep regret. As attribution, the article cited that the news had come from German magazine Der Spiegel.

While certain parts of the article were accurate, CRI’s overall interpretation of the news was wrong - it was not the Alabama Supreme Court that had passed the decision, but the US Supreme Court, which declared in a 5-4 decision on Tuesday that certain sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were outdated, calling for a revision of the law by Congress.

The Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson in the midst of the civil rights movement, prohibited certain states from passing any “voting qualifications or prerequisites…to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or colour.” Originally designed to combat racial discrimination and bloodshed against African-American voters in the American south, the Voting Rights Art had long existed as a racial equaliser until Tuesday, when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts called parts of it outdated, with “no logical relation to the present day”.

“The conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterises voting in the covered jurisdictions,” Roberts wrote in the majority court opinion. “African-American voter turnout has come to exceed white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered [by the Voting Rights Act].”

Opponents to the Supreme Court decision, who include Obama, argue than despite changing times, an undercurrent of racism still exists in the United States and the Voting Rights Act is necessary. They also argue that a sharply divided Congress is unlikely to make any progress revising the act.