Roll Call wrecks its journalistic integrity

Roll Call has been the go-to news source for Congress since 1955. Now, it’s becoming an echo chamber for the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center.

Roll Call has been around since 1955. Until recently, it maintained a respected journalistic standard in its news reporting.

Thanks to Roll Call political reporter Emily Kopp and her editors, that standard has collapsed.

Kopp wrote a hit piece on the Center for Security Policy and 10 other groups that signed a letter to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The story was about a letter the groups sent to Pelosi, calling for her to remove jihadist Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Center President Fred Fleitz called for Omar’s removal from the committee on February 12.

Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon broke news of the letter on March 4, which President Donald Trump tweeted out.

Roll Call covered Trump’s tweet in Kopp’s May 6 story. In it, Roll Call recycled unsubstantiated allegations from the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center to refer to one pro-Jewish group as having “neo-Nazi ties,” and to call the Center for Security Policy a “hate group.”

“Signatories include two organizations classified as anti-Muslim hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Both have ties to the Trump administration: ACT for America and the Center for Security Policy,” Roll Call said.

Roll Call distorts opposition to Muslim Brotherhood as being hateful against all Muslims

Citing the SPLC yet not giving the Center an honest chance to respond, Kopp distorted the Center’s scholarly and policy work on the Muslim Brotherhood and its front organizations in the United States.

Kopp wrote, “the center has a history of stoking conspiratorial fears about the Muslim Brotherhood and ‘creeping Sharia’ in order to make their case, according to the SPLC, which classifies the think tank as a hate group.”

For twenty years, the Center has produced documented reports on Islamist subversion in the United States, and testified before Congress on the matter.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the most influential Islamist network in the US, has been a major focus of Center research. The Brotherhood has responded accordingly through fronts like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and is SPLC allies.

In the article headline and text, Kopp and Roll Call editors falsely accused another signatory of the letter, ACT for America, of having “neo-Nazi ties.” In reality, ACT for America, as Debra Heine at PJ Media reported, canceled a 2017 “March Against Sharia” event in Arkansas when it found the organizer was tied to white supremacist groups. “And that is the totality of their ties to neo-Nazis,” Heine said.

Roll Call never reported that fact, yet put the “neo-Nazi” falsehood in the headline.

Violation of basic ethics of journalism

The article – and Roll Call’s entire editorial process – violated the basic ethics of news reporting:

Conflict of interests. Kopp is a former press intern for Pelosi. Covering news about Pelosi is a major conflict of interests. Roll Call failed to indicate in Kopp’s tag line, or anywhere in the article, that the writer had once worked for Pelosi.
Failure to give the accused a fair chance to respond. Roll Call attacked the Center for Security Policy without contacting the Center in time for comment. Kopp did call the Center, but too close to deadline to allow the Center to reply. This is an an old journalistic trick to satisfy an editor that the journalist “tried” to get the other side. Journalism ethics require that a reporter make honest efforts to contact the subject of a story. Kopp did not make that honest attempt. Roll Call posted the article without including the Center’s response. Center President Fred Fleitz demanded that the Center’s side be included in the story. Roll Call had the story up for 10 hours until modifying it to include a statement from Fleitz. (Roll Call did not inform its readers that it had modified the story. The Center has modified this article subsequently to make corrections.)
Reliance on discredited third-party source. Roll Call relied on an increasingly discredited third-party source to form the source of its false allegations. That source, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has no methodology for researching and defining what it identifies at “hate groups.” SPLC has made the Center – and Fleitz personally – targets of its hate-labeling campaign. Last year, the Center praised the Washington Post for questioning the SPLC’s role as an arbiter of “hate.”
Heavy editorializing in a “news” story. Kopp’s editorializing in what was supposed to be a news story diminished Roll Call’s credibility further. Kopp simply repeated the unsubstantiated SPLC accusations to twist the story to her point of view.

Roll Call’s entire editorial process has broken down

The article shows that the problem just isn’t with former Pelosi intern Kopp. Since being purchased by The Economist Group – a very well-regarded publisher – Roll Call‘s entire editorial process has broken down.

The Kopp story is part of what appears to be a systemic problem:

Roll Call’s editor-in-chief failed by hiring an amateur like Kopp and giving her the great responsibility of serving as a political reporter, when obviously Kopp is too immature or politicized to be reliable.
Roll Call’s managing editor failed by not ensuring that Kopp’s story met Roll Call‘s once-high journalistic standards.
Roll Call’s assignment editor failed by assigning a former Pelosi intern to cover a story relating to Pelosi, and by not ensuring on the macro level that the story is fair and objective.
Roll Call’s copy editor failed by attaching a sensationalist and false headline, and a deck based on a discredited third-party source, to Kopp’s terribly flawed story. The copy editor also failed to ensure on the micro level that the story was fair and objective.