The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been a favorite elitist media source for decades to warn constantly of a dangerous “far right” threat to America, from neo-Nazis to the Ku Klux Klan. They wanted you to believe that 23 skinheads meeting at a state park in Kentucky had national significance. All that fell apart this week.
A 2018 Anti-Defamation League report on the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan reported it “is the largest and the most active Klan group in the country with approximately 100 members.” But this somehow defines America with 340 million people as deeply racist.
On April 21, the Justice Department indicted the SPLC for financial fraud, taking money from leftist donors and paying informants inside racist and extremist groups and trying to hide the money trail. Naturally, the same media that has promoted SPLC’s narrative of an America gripped by White supremacy doesn’t want to get into the ugly specifics of the indictment underlining that alleged scam.
Even the “paper of record,” The New York Times ran a front-page story that laid out all the conservative complaints about the group in recent years, but didn’t get into their allegedly fraudulent payoffs.
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The Democrats came out and said, this is just paying informants like the FBI or the cops. But the informants are often not just keeping tabs, they’re pushing these groups into action. So, in this case, if the SPLC informant is helping push a far-right rally in Charlottesville that becomes a huge national news story, which leads to a massive influx of donations to SPLC, isn’t that an obvious scam?
On the evening after the indictment, only the “PBS News Hour” reported the story, and only for 69 seconds. Anchor Amna Nawaz was fairly straightforward. While there was no soundbite from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, they did have a soundbite of SPLC leader Bryan Fair claiming that they used informants to “save lives” in the 1970s.
Nawaz concluded: “The Southern Poverty Law Center was founded in 1971 and has long been criticized by Republicans who say it unfairly targets conservative groups and individuals. Last year, FBI Director Kash Patel said the agency was severing its ties with the center, which for years had provided law enforcement with research on domestic extremism.”
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The network newscasts think “domestic extremism” is only a right-wing phenomenon. There are no left-wing extremists in America.
A few weeks after President Donald Trump won re-election in 2024, PBS put on the SPLC to suggest Trump would cause a big uptick in bigotry. Their online headline: “Is the political climate influencing a spike in racist incidents?”
On April 22, ABC’s “Good Morning America” gave just 31 seconds to the SPLC indictment, with anchor Robin Roberts polishing it up as a “prominent civil rights organization.” Under the words on screen “Civil Rights Group Indicted on Fraud Charges,” reporter Aaron Katersky relayed the SPLC was accused “of defrauding donors by secretly paying informants inside the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups that it long investigated. The Southern Poverty Law Center said, ‘we are outraged by the false allegations’ and accused the Trump administration of targeting it for political reasons, guys.”
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The “CBS Evening News” was much more even-handed in a report that night. Reporter Jan Crawford aired clips of Blanche and Fair, and concluded by noting the SPLC has faced other scandals: “In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser was the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for articles alleging that the center was misleading donors and wasting their money, and more recently, critics say that its Hatewatch list of extremists includes many mainstream conservatives.”
No one recalled Floyd Corkins, who brought his SPLC “hate map” to a violent attack on the headquarters of the Christian conservative Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., in 2012. He carried a bag of Chick-fil-A sandwiches that he wanted to smear on his potential victims after he murdered them. Corkins was sentenced “to 25 years in prison on three felony charges, including a terrorism offense,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
On broadcast radio, NPR aired a report on the April 22 “Morning Edition” featuring both sides of the SPLC case. A similar report aired on that evening’s “All Things Considered,” but reporter Debbie Elliott implied the paying of informants happened long ago, not in the Trump era, and brought on MS NOW contributor Joyce Vance to argue, “What they were doing using paid informants had nothing to do with stoking the work of these terrorist groups and everything to do with exposing it.”
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On the April 23 talk show “Fresh Air,” host Terry Gross made a point of asking author Stephen Ross to explain the SPLC indictment in the context of his book on racist and anti-Semitic groups that formed after World War II. The SPLC was taking this battle against bigotry into our times and being punished for it.
The indictment also drew 17 minutes on “The NPR Politics Podcast,” featuring their “domestic extremism correspondent” Odette Yousef, who doesn’t find any extremism on the left. Typically, she declared on this program that the Trump administration is attempting to redefine extremism to focus on “what it characterizes as the far left and what it often refers to as Antifa.” They’re investigating “what this administration considers to be extreme left antifa extremists.”
After the assassination of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, Yousef energetically said no one could find evidence his killer was a left-wing extremist. When Trump declared Antifa was a domestic terrorist group last fall, Yousef was upset: “So I’m hearing a real fear that this conflation of anti-fascism and terrorism may stigmatize anyone or any group working on movements for community building and racial or social justice.”
This isn’t “public” broadcasting. It’s anti-public. It’s a good thing they were defunded.
