Black-owned newspaper denied interview with Ryan Walters about PragerU partnership

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to add a statement from the Tulsa World denying the assertion by Deon Osborne of the Black Wall Street Times that the World had called for Ryan Walters' removal from office.

The controversy over Ryan Walters' embrace of PragerU, a conservative educational content provider, intensified Thursday with a heated dispute over the Oklahoma State Department of Education banning a Black-owned newspaper from talking to the schools superintendent.

Deon Osborne, managing editor of the Black Wall Street Times, a Tulsa newspaper, complained that his publication had been banned unfairly from talking to Walters about the Education Department's new partnership with PragerU Kids.

More: PragerU Kids, controversial conservative group, to partner with Oklahoma schools

The department said the company, which is not a university, provides “educational, entertaining, pro-American kids content.” Walters said the videos and other materials provided by PragerU would help counter "the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education.”

Why PragerU has drawn controversy amid partnership with Oklahoma

But the decision was immediately controversial. Critics contend PragerU is primarily a right-wing propaganda group whose videos for children have minimized slavery and implicitly compared climate change activists with Nazis. In one video an animated Christopher Columbus tells two modern-day children that he shouldn't be condemned for enslaving Indigenous people because in his day it was seen as "no big deal." "Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?" he tells the children.

The Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-OK) has called PragerU an "Islamophobic" organization distributing "hate content."

Writing in his newspaper, Osborne said that when he tried to interview Walters he was turned down by the Education Department's Communications Director Dan Isett. Osborne said Isett told him the interview request was denied because of posts made by the Black Wall Street Times' editor-in-chief on X, formerly known as Twitter.

One post called Walters "trash."

Two others, sent to The Oklahoman by Isett, called Walters a "Nazi" and a "Klansman."

"You may as well come out from under that white sheet," Nehemiah D. Frank, the editor and founder of Black Wall Street Times, wrote in the Klansman post.

The Nazi and Klansman posts do not currently appear on X.

Why Ryan Walters denied Black Wall Street Times an interview, according to communications director

The Black Wall Street Times is named after a residential area in Tulsa called "Black Wall Street." Before it was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, it was one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation. Estimates of the number killed in the violent mob action range from 75 to 300.

Osborne said Isett's denial of the interview request was unjustified because other news organizations, including The Oklahoman and the Tulsa World, have called for Walters' removal from office in editorials and columns.

The Tulsa World, however, said it has not called for Walters' removal from office either in columns written by individuals or in editorials on behalf of the paper.

Islett told The Oklahoman neither organization had not used "inflammatory" rhetoric. "Egregious things, calling (Walters) a Nazi, calling him a Klansman, things of that nature."

Isett said the Black Wall Street Times had argued that "an employee's comments on their own personal, social media had no bearing on their reporting ... (but) I consider them closely linked."

"It's a free country," Isett said. "You can disagree, but you can't say inflammatory things like that, absurd things, and expect be granted access to the office holder because you've crossed the line from being a journalist at that point."

Walters, a former teacher who was education secretary under Gov. Kevin Stitt before winning the elected office of state schools superintendent in 2022, has consistently pushed for more "patriotic" teaching and has described Oklahoma schools as ground zero in a "civil war" with the far left.

Ryan Walters appears in PragerU video

After announcing the PragerU partnership, Walters appeared in a video on the company's website. He told PragerU CEO Marissa Streit in the video that he used the content in his classes when he taught high school history in McAlester.

Walters added that he could “not be more excited to get this content in our classrooms, to get this understanding of American history, without any indoctrination but actually the facts of what happened, so the kids can know the principles this country was founded on.”

However, critics have accused the company of spreading misinformation and downplaying topics ranging from slavery to climate change, and social media companies have flagged some of the group’s videos.

More: Florida approves PragerU curriculum: Why critics are sounding the alarm on right-wing bias

The company lost a fight against YouTube in 2020 when a federal appeals court ruled that YouTube, as a private company, could ban PragerU content. YouTube had deemed some of the videos inappropriate.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: PragerU Oklahoma controversy: Tulsa paper denied Ryan Walters interview