Barack Obama has wrongly been reported to have asked Jay-Z to discourage hip-hop artists from backing Donald Trump.
Earlier this week, reports circulated on social media that former president Barack Obama was upset with the vocal support that hip-hop artists are providing Trump. The current administration has insisted that Donald Trump has played an instrumental role in the ever-decreasing black unemployment rate in America. However, as the Inquisitr reported earlier, the decreasing rate is an not overnight phenomenon with statistics showing that the black unemployment rate has been decreasing since 2010.
However, some hip-hop artists — most notably Kanye West — have allowed themselves to be carried away with Trump’s claims, receiving a lot of scorn from some quarters of the black community. Jay-Z, a hip-hop artist himself and a friend of Kanye, criticized him for his reductionist understanding of the problem, telling CNN earlier this year that money is not the only thing that is stopping black Americans from progress.
Earlier this month, false reports also circulated that Jay-Z had asked Meek Mill not to meet Donald Trump at the White House to discuss prison reform. Meek Mill did pull out of the meeting, but he confirmed it had nothing to do with Jay-Z.
“That’s not true at all, I just ain’t feel good about it. The day before I started to think about it. It’s too much criticism. Me and the president, we represent two different sides of things.”
Probably picking on these strands of information, a pro-Trump Twitter activist named Josh Cornett claimed that Barack Obama had asked Jay-Z to discourage artists like Kanye and Meek Mill from backing Trump. This was put forward as fact without any corroborating evidence to back up the claim.
“BREAKING: Sources are confirming that former President Barack Obama has called Jay-Z several times over the past month pleading to discourage fellow Hip Hop artists from meeting with President Trump… developing.”
This tweet was picked up by YourNewsWire , which reported that Barack Obama was indeed asking Jay-Z to discourage hip-hop artists from praising Trump or even engaging in a dialogue with him. This is patently false, as Gossip Cop can verify. A source close to Jay-Z told the outlet that Obama hasn’t called Jay-Z to discuss anything of the sort, while none of Obama’s representatives confirmed the former president calling Jay-Z at all.
With the proliferation of fake news media, we need to be careful about what reports on the internet are actually true. We debunk the news claiming Barack Obama asked Jay-Z to discourage hip-hop artists from backing Trump once and for all.
