The April 21 indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) doesn’t just threaten a major organ of the left’s lawfare machine; it also puts in jeopardy one of the corporate news media’s favorite sources of activist data.
For decades, but particularly since the first Trump administration, the SPLC has enjoyed a perverse symbiotic relationship with the left-wing press. Their absurd “hate group” designations provided the media with ammunition against their right-wing targets, and the media in turn held up the SPLC as the gold standard of analysis and objectivity.
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS
- Since the start of President Trump’s first term, cable and broadcast networks have cited the SPLC 392 times.
- SPLC stats were cited 6,600% more than average during the week surrounding the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
- CNN and MS NOW have aired a two-minute long SPLC advertisement hundreds of times in the past 24 months, with the estimated ad revenue totalling in the millions of dollars.
MRC analysts combed through a combination of SnapStream and Nexis recordings of all coverage on liberal cable (CNN and MSNBC/MS Now) and broadcast (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) networks from January 20, 2017, through April 20, 2026. Since the start of President Trump’s first term, those networks have cited the SPLC as an authoritative source a whopping 392 times, in addition to conducting 44 friendly interviews with SPLC personnel.
MS NOW (including when it was still MSNBC) was responsible for 246 of those citations (63%, or nearly two-thirds), as well as 35 interviews (80%). CNN cited SPLC research or proclamations a total of 120 times, but aired just six of the 44 interviews. Broadcast networks were responsible for the remaining 28 citations and three interviews.
Notably, 54 of the total citations (~14%) occurred during a single seven-day period surrounding the August, 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, which the SPLC allegedly helped fund, according to the indictment. Additionally, eleven of their 44 interviews (25%) occurred during that same week.
Despite accounting for more than one-eight of all instances in which the SPLC was cited, that single week comprised just 0.2 percent of the 3,377-day scope of this study. That comes out to a 6,600 percent uptick in exposure for the SPLC, as a result of an event that they themselves allegedly secretly funded —quite the return on investment.
In late 2024, CNN and MSNBC began running a 120-second fundraising advertisement for the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s since aired hundreds of times, meaning multiple millions of dollars in advertising revenue paid to these networks by the SPLC, absent some kind of special arrangement. Since the indictment was announced, MS NOW has continued to run these ads.
Given the corporate press’s incessant, gullible (or perhaps cynical?) regurgitation of the SPLC’s assertions, this indictment draws into question a large chunk of their prior reporting. So far, most of the media have attempted to downplay or dismiss the allegations against their favorite shakedown outfit. The only stand-out exception has been a Wednesday CBS Evening News report on the charges against the SPLC. It’s anyone’s guess whether the other networks will eventually follow suit.
