Imagine you are reading a news story about race relations in the United States, and the reporter interviews the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan to get his opinion on Black people. Sounds outrageous, right? Reporters would never do this, because the KKK is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the opinion of the Grand Dragon is not newsworthy, because his views are predictable and beyond the pale. The KKK is just one of over 1,000 SPLC-designated hate groups, and news organizations generally refrain from interviewing any of them, with one conspicuous exception: anti-immigrant hate groups.
The White supremacist terrorist attack in Buffalo led to criticism of Tucker Carlson for mainstreaming the “great replacement” theory that immigrants are replacing White Americans. Unfortunately, Fox News is not the only news organization that deserves the blame. Most of the major media outlets in the United States have played a similar role in legitimizing extremist views on immigration by platforming representatives of groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies. Like the KKK, both FAIR and CIS are SPLC-designated hate groups that promote the idea that immigrants represent an invasion that will replace White Americans. Despite this, FAIR and CIS are routinely interviewed as legitimate voices in immigration debates. This should end.
According to the SPLC, a hate group is “an organization that – based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities – has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.” The SPLC designated FAIR a hate group in 2007
— source yesmagazine.org | Reece Jones | Jun 14, 2022