The Media Research Center continued to whine that non-right-wing networks are treating the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center as the lawfare that it is:
- MS NOW Defends SPLC Indictment as Political, as it Airs Their Ads
- Associated Press Frames SPLC Indictment as ‘Political Weapon’
- FBI’s Patel: SPLC ‘Paying the Very Villains of Our Society’ Despite Telling Donors They’re Fighting Hate (Craig Bannister CNSNews propaganda piece)
- SPLC’s Indictment Prompts Loss of Donations from Vanguard, Fidelity Charitable Programs (Craig Bannister CNSNews propaganda piece)
Tim Graham was gleeful about the indictment in his April 23 podcast:
The Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for financial fraud, taking money from leftist donors and paying informants inside racist and extremist groups and trying to hide the money trail as they “fight extremism and hate.” Naturally, the leftist networks and newspapers don’t want to get into the ugly specifics of the indictment underlining that scam.
[…]The 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. From the Oklahoma City bombing to the January 6 riot, the “Hatewatch” theorists have been gurus for the media wanting to scare everyone about the powerful right-wing extremists.
After the indictment, 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 moves. 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 a scam?
Didn’t the MRC insist that anything involving “far-right” people is not a news story?
Jorge Bonilla was mad that Rep. Jamie Raskin defended the SPLC in an April 26 post:
Brennan never did push back on Raskin’s multiple sophistries. Instead to her next question on whether the current climate of political violence is dissuading people from running for office, before ending the interview.
Raskin shamelessly lied about the SPLC indictment by framing it as being solely about the use of confidential informants. It was not. As first reported by CBS, the SPLC was indicted on fraud charges for, among other things, funding events such as the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and then using the events they funded in donor appeals.
It took both Michael Morris and Heather Moon to complain in an April 30 post:
An 11-count grand jury indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center exposed serious allegations against one of the country’s most radical left-wing organizations. However, its visibility across the Big Four News Apps, which collectively reach well over 100 million Americans every week, told a different story.
On Apr. 21, 2026, a grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC for “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.” In addition to these charges, the grand jury indictment accused the SPLC of sending millions of dollars to members of hate groups, including over $270,000 to one of the organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, NC.
After news of the grand jury indictment rocked the decades-old leftist institution, three of the nation’s largest news aggregators (Google News, Microsoft’s MSN and Yahoo News) ignored the story altogether in their top stories in the mornings after the scandal broke. And while Apple News did highlight news of the bombshell indictment, it only featured two stories about the scandal in the five days after the story broke—both from left-leaning media outlets.
Morris and Moon listed how “The Big Four News Apps had ample opportunity to promote numerous stories on the SPLC scandal from AllSides-rated right-leaning outlets, but they chose not to do so” — but it didn’t perform fact-checks on the articles from those right-wing outlets (and as we’ve noted, AllSides has a decided right-leaning bias). By contrast, they grumbled that a USA Today article “drew a false equivalence between the actions of law enforcement and those of the nonprofit SPLC” and that ” USA Today spun the narrative as favorable to SPLC as possible.”