Kathleen Geier at the Washington Monthly rightly notes that this Scripps story about the Exalted Cyclops of the Memphis Klan, headlined “KKK plans rally in Memphis Saturday to celebrate white peoples’ rights”, reads like a piece in the Onion:
[Cyclops] Edward curses sparingly, drinks rarely, and keeps his hair clipped short — his tribute to his old-fashioned Christian values. With a voice to match his hulking frame, Edward issues commands, not requests, and rarely bookends his sentences with “please” or “thank you.” […]To Barker [another Klansman] and Edward, the Klan’s agenda is pretty simple: Send the immigrants back where they came from, silence the homosexuals and the communists (known as liberals today), promote sobriety and abstinence, end abortion, and discourage the mingling of races in a way “God never intended.”
While Edward and Barker don’t dispute the Klan’s racist history, they deny they’re interested in harassing black people.
In fairness–because, after all, who deserves fair media treatment more than the beleaguered and misunderstood Klan–the story also includes some quotes from “the other side”, a professor who’s written a book about the modern Klan. And it does make note of some unpleasantness in South in the 60’s.
Geier faults the writer and editor of this piece, but I do not. This piece is exactly what happens when you take the last 40 years of journalistic teaching and practice and apply it to a subject like the Klan. There are always both sides to the story, objective journalists must report them, feature stories are not regular journalism and should try to carefully reflect the “truth” of the subject being featured using their own words, and the only permissible judgments that can be made in a story come out of the mouths of quoted sources. At Scripps, the View from Nowhere fought the Klan, and the Klan won.
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