The biggest story of last week was one the mainstream media did not want to cover.
Last week, a federal grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on 11 counts related to their decades-long scheme of bankrolling leading figures of white supremacist extremist groups through shell corporations under the guise of paying “informants.”
The bombshell was certainly newsworthy, but media outlets that self-identify as news organizations treated the damaging revelations about the Left’s favorite attack dog as if they had been asked to pick up its droppings.
“From following mainstream press coverage,”describedNational Review’s Becket Adams, “you’d know mostly that a supposedly noble and esteemed anti-racist group is tied up somehow in Trump administration chicanery.” In its solestoryon the affair, NBC News made sure to inform readers in the subtitle that the SPLC was “outraged by the false allegations.”
USA Today, meanwhile, tried to absolve the SPLC of wrongdoing in the headline itself, running articles titled, “FBI: SPLC paid informants without donors knowing. Feds pay them too,” and “From fighting Klan, neo-Nazis to federal charges: What’s next for SPLC?”
“This defense is insane,”counteredDaily Signal Senior Editor Tyler O’Neil, who literally wrote the book on the SPLC’s misbehavior, on “Washington Watch.” “By the plain text of the indictment, this is something other than your traditional informant process, and … the Southern Poverty Law Center is not a law enforcement entity. This is not the same thing as when the FBI has informants.”
For its part, CNN had no soonermentionedthe “nearly a dozen counts” in general terms before it hurried on to assure readers that the SPLC “informant” program was “now defunct” and that the SPLC had “denied any wrongdoing,” without noticing the evident dissonance between these defenses. In a follow-uppiece, it tried to pick apart the indictment, arguing that it “offered few details of how donor money that paid the informants was used to further the groups’ violent interests.”
Over at The New York Times, Adamssuggestededitors were “experimenting with the idea of a headline that says nothing at all,” after theirs read, “Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes.” Said Adams, “One can’t help but wonder why the paper chose to omit the objectively newsworthy allegation that the anti-hate group bankrolled Klan members.”
Finally, NPR didn’t even bother to assign their own reporter; they merelyborrowed a storyfrom the Associated Press. Axios appeared to ignore the story altogether.
This suggests another side to the story: not every media outlet devoted such careful inattention to the bombshell indictment. The AP andABC Newsprovided decent reporting, while The Washington Post has now run at least five stories on the controversy. Alas, that such demonstrations of basic journalistic competence merit recognition only serves as further condemnation of those outlets that deliberately missed the plot.
Source: VidNews » Feed
