When it comes to hitting new lows in journalism, never underestimate Univision.
The network’s latest doozy is its decision to dedicate a full hour-long program to a Ku Klux Klan organization that even the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) says is “falling apart at the seams.”
Despite the fact that both the SPLC and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) report that the Loyal White Knights are in decline and disarray, that didn’t stop Univision’s late night evening news anchor, Ilia Calderón, from giving the group’s Imperial Wizard, Chris Barker, VIP hour-long treatment.
As images of Barker, his wife and children were featured among a total of seven hooded figures parading around a cross burning, Calderón did the honors of presenting the group as a rising national menace, and shredded the credibility of the network’s news division in the process.
ILIA CALDERON, NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: Beliefs that they perpetuate from generation to generation, in the Klan. Their children participate in the ceremony. So it is important that parents know. We show them what is in the world, but in some way we have to prepare them. Because it’s there. And now more than ever, it’s out there.
Following in the footsteps of Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who has also been taken lately to visiting and hyping the nation’s oldest and perennially publicity-hungry hate group, Calderón then went on to cite the SPLC’s discredited annual report on hate groups in the United States.
ILIA CALDERON, NEWS ANCHOR, UNIVISION: According to the annual census of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that monitors the activities of these groups, there are currently more than 900 of them, and some 130 are affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
However, Calderón failed to inform her audience that even that SPLC report indicates that there was a sharp 32% decline in the number of KKK groups in the United States last year, falling from 190 chapters in 2015 to 130 chapters in 2016.
And don’t even begin to carefully examine all the 917 groups the SPLC now classifies as “hate groups” in the United States, as the whole house of cards propping up Univision and the rest of the liberal media’s ‘Hate Rising’ narrative really begins to crater.
The SPLC itself admits that driving the nominal growth of 25 additional ‘hate groups’ in the U.S. between 2015 and 2016 (917 hate groups overall in 2016, compared with 892 in 2015) were groups listed in the “anti-Muslim” category, which grew by 67 from 2015 to 2016. Moreover, the overall number of SPLC classified hate groups in the country is also currently down 10% from its recorded historic high of 1,018 in 2011.
In addition, most of the new crop of “hate” groups in the U.S. classified by the SPLC as “anti-Muslim”, such as ACT for America, the Center for Security Policy and Jihad Watch, would counter that they are the ones actually fighting the single greatest menace of hate in our day – that of radical Islamic terrorism – which regularly takes credit for perpetrating horrific acts of mass murder and mayhem throughout the world, including the June 2016 killing of 49 mostly Hispanic-American citizens in Orlando, Florida.
Equally galling to tens of millions of Americans is that the SPLC also classifies as ‘hate groups’ all kinds of other organizations that either simply affirm traditional Christian standards of sexual morality and marriage (such as the Ruth Institute, the American Family Association, the World Congress of Families and the Family Research Council), advocate on behalf of religious freedom (such as the Alliance Defending Freedom) or favor the full enforcement of federal immigration laws, along with moving U.S. immigration policy to a more limited, merit-based system (Center for Immigration Studies, Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Immigration Reform Law Institute, among others).
Finally, it is also worth noting that the latest Univision report on the Klan also deceptively portrayed a February 2016 public event by another small handful of Loyal Knights in Anaheim, California.
“It became violent,” Calderón told her audience. “The members of the Ku Klux Klan involved in the incident were not arrested, nor were charged,” Calderón continued, giving the impression that the KKK members at that event instigated and got away with violence, when in fact it was widely reported at the time that extreme left counterprotesters were responsible for instigating the violence and had to face charges for it, while all the Klan members involved ended up being exonerated, because it was determined that they responded entirely “in self defense.”
The dishonest and deceitful report was also thus symptomatic of how Univision, like much of the rest of the national liberal media, tends to turn a blind eye to some other real news: evidence of violent ‘hate rising’ on the extreme left of the political spectrum.
JOSH HERSH, VICE NEWS: Brian Levin realized the size of the problem last year, when he went as an observer to a KKK rally in Anaheim, and found himself caught up in a mob of furious counterprotesters.
BRIAN LEVIN, CENTER FOR STUDY OF HATE AND EXTREMISM: The Grand Dragon fell, and was immediately set upon by a mob.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: Get away, get away.
BRIAN LEVIN: And that was like the longest four minutes of my life. And at that point, I saw something coalescing on the hard left.
