Complete Story
12/04/2017
Poynter: Tips on how to write about Nazis and other extremists
I was 22 when I covered my first skinhead march as a cops reporter in the Coeur d’Alene bureau of the Spokesman-Review newspaper.
We were under constant pressure from the community to ignore the white supremacists among us, even though the FBI had a five-person bureau in Coeur d’Alene just to keep track of them all.
We learned, through trial and error, that documenting their presence and their activities was a constant balancing act. Give the Nazis too much attention and you normalize or glorify their repugnant beliefs. Ignore them completely, and you spend a lot of time catching up when they finally do something violent that can’t be ignored.
So I recognized what the New York Times was trying to do in its profile of a “Nazi sympathizer next door.” There were two key flaws in this article, one in execution and one in delivery.
Execution failure
Reporter Richard Fausset gathers fabulous details to humanize his main character. We see him at Panera for lunch. We get a glimpse his Target wedding registry. But Fausset fails to show us how his young Nazi arrived in this place.
