Media coverage of white supremacist groups has faced severe criticism but the past year has seen some exemplary reporting

Getting it right: the best reporting on white supremacists and neo-Nazis

This past year has seen repeated debates over how the news media cover white supremacist groups. Readers have slammed media profiles of white supremacist leaders for “normalizing” them, while some questioned why news outlets were covering fringe racist groups at all.

As part of the joint project by WNYC’s On the Media and Guardian US on how to improve coverage of white supremacists, here is a look at some of the best reporting on white nationalists and neo-Nazis over the past year, from classic follow-the-money stories to investigations of lesser-known, extremely violent groups.

Inside Atomwaffen As It Celebrates a Member for Allegedly Killing a Gay Jewish College Student, ProPublica, February 2018

Over just a few months, people associated with the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen have been charged in connection with five murders. Another member pleaded guilty to possession of explosives. ProPublica obtained hundreds of thousands of online chat messages from Atomwaffen discussions, part of an investigation into the group’s leaders and its “Hate Camp” weapons training sessions. Following the investigation, and scrutiny from other news organizations, at least four companies, including YouTube, took steps to bar Atomwaffen from using their platforms and services. ProPublica previously investigated the Rise Above Movement, identifying the group’s core members and examining why the violent racist group had drawn little scrutiny from law enforcement.

‘I don’t know how you got this way,’ The Washington Post, February 2018

In Ohio, a mother and grandmother watch their son become a neo-Nazi, and struggle to figure out what to do, or what they should say to change his mind.

This is the Daily Stormer’s Playbook, Huffington Post, December 2017

Huffington Post obtained the “style guide” for a prominent neo-Nazi website, which gave the site’s writers explicit guidance on how to use humor and irony to make their support of genocide seem chill and self-deprecating. “Remember this the next time you find yourself wondering if perhaps they don’t mean it quite like that,” the Huffington Post noted. “Because they always, always do.”

The Making of an American Nazi, The Atlantic, December 2017

A deeply reported profile of a neo-Nazi internet troll, showing how an unstable teenager who coordinated cruel harassment of his high school girlfriend went on to stage coordinated “troll storms” against political targets, including a Jewish woman and her family in Montana.

Birth of a White Supremacist, The New Yorker, October 2017

In early 2017, Michael Peinovich, the host of an antisemitic podcast, was doxxed, his real name made public, along with the fact that his wife was Jewish. The heart of this New Yorker profile of Peinovich are interviews with his grieving, furious father, who was still trying to make sense of his son’s radicalization.

Alt White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate, BuzzFeed, October 2017

A meticulous investigation, based on emails, video and documents, into how Breitbart and rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos “smuggled Nazi and white nationalist ideas into the mainstream”. In the wake of the investigation, conservative donor Robert Mercer announced that he was selling his stake in Breitbart and severing all ties with Yiannopoulos. “I was mistaken to have supported him,” Mercer wrote.

A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof, GQ, August 2017

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, one of America’s most virtuosic nonfiction writers, spent months in South Carolina interviewing white supremacist Dylann Roof’s mother, father, friends and former teachers, as well as family members of the nine people he murdered at a historic black church in Charleston.

Charlottesville: Race and Terror, Vice News Tonight, August 2017

This award-winning documentary, released immediately after the violence in Charlottesville, showed Americans exactly what had occurred, and documented the extreme views of the men who were marching.

The Moneyman Behind the Alt-Right, BuzzFeed, July 2017

BuzzFeed profiled William Regnery II, a conservative multimillionaire who never graduated from college and “floundered” when he tried to run the family business, but who has poured hundreds of thousands of dollars, and perhaps more, into supporting white nationalist political organizing. “My support has produced a much greater bang for the buck than by the brothers Koch or Soros, Inc.,” Regnery told BuzzFeed. “I just like living around people with whom I’m most comfortable, and that’s white.”

Richard Spencer’s white-nationalist nonprofit failed to file basic paperwork to keep fundraising, Los Angeles Times, 2017

White nationalist Richard Spencer was soliciting tax-exempt donations to support his advocacy for a white ethno-state. But he wasn’t filing the paperwork correctly. Over the course of a year, the Los Angeles Times repeatedly scrutinized his nonprofit’s compliance with tax regulations, finding that the IRS had stripped Spencer’s organization’s tax-exempt status for paperwork failures, and that the organization had broken Virginia nonprofit law. “Can I just hire you to do this for me?” Richard Spencer asked the Los Angeles Times reporter investigating his compliance with nonprofit tax rules. The answer: No.