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It is fair enough that the network newscasts should spend so much time on this murder--not because James von Brunn's ideology presents a threat to the republic but because his act was bizarre and sensational.
So CBS' Bob Orr was out of line when he tried to make more of von Brunn's bigoted views than they warranted. His coverage of von Brunn's Website holywesternempire.org and his writings Kill the Best Gentiles was fair game. Where Orr went out of line was to claim that von Brunn's alleged violence "underscores a troubling trend" and that "the hatred he spewed is at the very base of a wider ongoing threat." He presented no evidence other than to say that von Brunn "has moved around in white supremacist circles." When he tied von Brunn to the assassination of George Tiller, the Wichita abortionist, he did so not by establishing a link between the two but by stating that they occurred eleven days apart. Tyndall Report found similar recklessness in Orr's April coverage of a Homeland Security report on white supremacists. This is not reporting; this is innuendo.
Mara Schiavocampo on NBC's In Depth was nuanced where Orr was slapdash. She showed us the nation's most active neo-Nazis, the National Socialist Movement, parading in St Louis. She pointed out that NSM has been officially designated as non-violent. She obtained a soundbite on their racist program, which is one of citizenship. "Only pure whites can be citizens." Besides people of color, they would also consign homosexuals and Jews to guest-resident status. Schiavocampo checked in with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the leading monitor of white supremacists. It mentioned neither the Federal Reserve Board nor the Nazi Holocaust, von Brunn's pet issues, as ideological motivation: "Principally these groups have really successfully exploited the immigration issue." Hispanics, not Jews, seem to be their betes noires.
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