It’s widely assumed in thriller movies that if ever the truth is allowed to leak out about a powerful institution’s fundamental corruption, then its reputation must come crashing down once and for all.
But in real life, multiple disgraces can have negligible impact on an organization’s reputation in the prestige press as long as it continues to serve its function in furthering The Narrative.
I notice that among intelligent but naive young people of a scientific bent, there is a recurrent assumption that once the facts get out, then everything will change. If the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment about the speed of light turns out negative, then the Newtonian model is shattered and eventually there must be a paradigm shift to Einsteinian relativity.
But that’s not the way it works in public affairs, where control of The Megaphone is what matters because most people can’t remember much. You have to repeat the facts over and over and over to have any chance of ever moving the needle.
For example, since the 1990s close observers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s most profitable nonprofits (endowment in fiscal year 2018 was $471,000,000, up from $319,300,000 just two years earlier), have recognized that it is America’s most lucrative hate organization.
The SPLC’s legendary founder Morris Dees (currently on his sixth wife) is basically a sleazy Southern TV preacher type, but one who long ago figured out that poor Southern Baptists had less money to send him than rich Northern liberals. This junk-mail genius realized he could monetize the regional, ethnic, and class hatreds directed against his own people.
But isn’t it a little crass to whip up hatred of poor white Southerners among rich white Northerners? Morris had the perfect answer: He’s not the hater; it’s the people he hates who deserved to be hated because they are the haters.
This logic, such as it is, proved utterly convincing to the mainstream media, who anointed the SPLC as the grand arbiter of whom to hate. As the satirical Babylon Bee reported in 2018:
Southern Poverty Law Center Adds Itself To List Of Hate Groups
…After the announcement, major media outlets accepted the SPLC’s new distinction without question, but immediately ran into a catch-22—how to malign the newly-anointed hate group without citing the newly-anointed hate group. At publishing time, the press was still unsure how to deal with the paradox.
The SPLC suffered a disastrous March 2019 with three consecutive scandals exposing the SPLC, seemingly once and for all, as a clownishly transparent fund-raising operation that whips up hate for cash. “The New York Times ran a dozen articles in August citing the Southern Poverty Law Center as the expert authority on who deserves to be hated.”
Yet, just a few months after all the bad publicity, there are no noticeable effects on how the wire services and The New York Times treat the SPLC as the objective authority on who are the Bad Guys you are obligated to hate. They simply assume most people won’t remember that the SPLC humiliated itself last March.
As you may recall, however, back in mid-March SPLC president Richard Cohen fired Dees for unspecified reasons, but which were rumored to be racism and sexism.
Cohen announced that Michelle Obama’s chief of staff Tina Tchen had been engaged to sniff out any remaining unwokeness in the organization.
But Cohen was soon out the door as well.
And within another week it turned out that it was Tchen who had made the phone call to Chicago DA Kim Foxx to tell her to let hate-hoaxing actor Jussie Smollett walk.
To have your founder disgraced could be seen as a misfortune, but to have your founder, CEO, and designated savior all shamed in two weeks bespeaks of venality.
You might think that these events would leave the SPLC permanently tarred with adjectives such as “scandal-plagued” or at least “controversial.”
But no, a few months later, it’s as if the SPLC has a spotless history, at least judging from all twelve New York Times articles published in August that cite the SPLC.
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