The Barack Obama Presidential Center opened its doors to the public in Chicago on Juneteenth, and people were happy about it. Fox News sent a reporter to find out why that was wrong. The results were exactly what you'd expect.
A Star-Studded Opening, A Furious Cable Network
The 19.3-acre campus in Chicago opened to the public on Friday, June 19th, Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the day enslaved Black Americans were declared free. According to Fox News, Thursday night kicked things off with a private ceremony and concert that pulled in Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, and Steven Spielberg, which Fox News described as "Hollywood's hottest ticket" in a headline that was somehow meant to be a criticism.
Then the gates opened and regular people showed up. Families from Chicago. Day-trippers from St. Louis. People who grew up on the South Side. And Fox News was right there with a microphone, ready to give them plenty of rope.
What the Visitors Actually Said
Ashley Woods, who made the trip with her friend Lauren Tillman from about 40 minutes outside Chicago, told Fox News Digital that the center represents something she didn't have growing up. "Growing up in a place like Chicago, you don't really think you can do much besides being a rapper or, you know, going into sports," she said. "To see that somebody actually made it to the top per se, they were able to run the nation, there was very little scandal around him and his family, like it just shows you that we can be more than what America tells us we can be."
Sheryl Rogers and Peggy Neely-Harris drove in from St. Louis for the weekend. Rogers told Fox News that for African Americans, the center represents "a coming together, a reckoning, a remembrance of the excellence that is within each one of us, particularly at this time when our very existence is under attack." Neely-Harris called the center "a light in this present darkness."
These are moving quotes from real people expressing genuine pride. Fox News printed them and then immediately tried to fact-check the vibes.
Then Fox News Did the Thing Fox News Does
Right after quoting visitors who described Obama's presidency as largely scandal-free, the outlet helpfully inserted a paragraph beginning, "However, Obama did face some major scandals and controversies during his two terms in the White House."
What followed was the Fox News Obama scandal greatest hits package: the DOJ's seizure of James Rosen's phone records, the IRS slow-rolling Tea Party nonprofit applications, Operation Fast and Furious, and the drone strike killings of four American citizens in Yemen. These are all real things that happened and are genuinely worth scrutiny. Fast and Furious in particular was a genuine policy disaster that got a Border Patrol agent killed. The drone program raised serious civil liberties questions that civil libertarians on the left raised loudly at the time.
But here is the thing Fox News will never, ever do: apply this same "however" paragraph to literally any Republican administration. The outlet that spent eight years cataloguing Obama's scandals has spent the last several months carefully avoiding the word "scandal" in connection with a president currently facing allegations ranging from foreign emoluments to firing independent watchdogs to using the Justice Department as a personal collections agency. The whiplash would be funny if it weren't so exhausting.
The Center Itself, Which Is Actually a Big Deal
Lost in the cable news theater is the fact that the Obama Presidential Center is a genuinely significant civic project. It sits on the South Side of Chicago, a neighborhood that has historically been written off by politicians and developers alike. A Fox News piece from the same weekend noted that some local South Side residents feel the project hasn't done enough for the surrounding community, which is a fair and worthwhile criticism that deserves more column inches than "Oprah attended the party."
The center includes a museum, a public library branch, a recording studio, athletic facilities, and green space on what had been a largely neglected stretch of parkland. Whether it fulfills its promise to the neighborhood is a question that will take years to answer. The people who showed up opening weekend, though, weren't there to debate infrastructure investment models. They were there because a Black president from Chicago built something in their city, opened it on Juneteenth, and invited them in.
What Chicago Actually Looks Like Right Now
Tillman told Fox News that the center matters partly because "Chicago looks like a certain place to certain people who are not from the area." She's being polite. She means that for decades, Chicago's South Side has been used as a prop in conservative media, held up as evidence that Democratic urban governance is a failure, that Black communities are inherently dangerous, that nothing good comes out of that zip code.
So yeah. When something like this gets built there, people show up. They drive four hours from St. Louis. They bring their kids. They take pictures in front of the glass facade. Fox News covers it as a human interest piece and then quietly inserts a paragraph about Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress, as if that is what these families were thinking about while they walked through the museum.
The Dingo Take
Look, the Obama presidency was not without its failures, contradictions, and genuine abuses of power. The drone program was a moral catastrophe that the left didn't criticize nearly enough because their guy was doing it. Fast and Furious was a botched federal operation that had deadly consequences. The Rosen wiretap was a press freedom violation. These things are true and should be part of the historical record.
But Fox News didn't dispatch a reporter to Chicago on Juneteenth weekend because they care about a complete historical record of the Obama presidency. They sent someone there to catch Black people being happy and then put a wet blanket on it. The "however" paragraph isn't journalism. It's a reflex. It's what you do when you're so deep in the culture war that a family from the South Side saying they're proud of their neighborhood is a threat that needs to be neutralized with Eric Holder trivia.
The Obama Presidential Center will stand or fall on whether it actually delivers for the community around it, and that is a story worth covering seriously. The people who showed up opening weekend deserve better than being used as straight-line setups for a network's talking points package. They drove there on a holiday to feel something real. Fox News was the only one in the crowd trying to make sure they didn't.
