The Killer, the Reporter, and the Southern Poverty Law Center

2/15/2015

Reporter interviews source about murderer, doesn't ask about murderer's apparent fondness for source's organization.

Craig Hicks, the man who murdered three Muslims in North Carolina this week, had a Facebook page. One of the groups he liked on it is the Southern Poverty Law Center.

An AlterNet article about Hicks—reprinted today in both Raw Story and Salon—includes several long quotes from Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Guess what subject never comes up?

No, I don't think the SPLC deserves any blame for the crime. That would be ridiculous. But the SPLC itself has a long history of throwing around blame in precisely that ridiculous way, so it would have been nice to hear how Potok reacts when an event like this lands in his own backyard. Double standards deserve to be challenged, right?

By the way: While the AlterNet piece doesn't mention Hicks' apparent fondness for the SPLC, it does mention the fact that his Facebook likes lean liberal. But it dismisses this as unimportant, telling us the significant thing is that Hicks "appears to fit the psychological profile of violent extremists—regardless of their ideological stripes."

So it isn't ideology that's important but personality type? Apparently not: Having set ideology aside, the story smuggles it back in a little later:

Most [lone-wolf terrorists] were not young like the Boston Marathon bombers, but "were clustered most heavily between 30 and 49 years of age, although a surprising number were older than that," [an SPLC report] said. "This suggests that perpetrators spend many years on the radical right, absorbing extremist ideology, before finally acting out violently."

That summation strongly resembles Craig Stephen Hicks.

I can think of one way it doesn't.

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