Intelligence Report editor Mark Potok (special)

From a newsletter of a few pages to a glossy, full-color magazine much like a major newsweekly, the Intelligence Report produced by the Center's Intelligence Project has developed over the course of some 20 years into a widely respected and award-winning publication.

Today it is the nation's preeminent periodical monitoring the radical right in the U.S. The Report is now sent to some 300,000 people, including human rights groups, politicians, scholars, Southern Poverty Law Center donors, and nearly 60,000 law enforcement officers.

"The Intelligence Report has become our primary means of communicating important information about extremist groups and individuals to law enforcement officers and the general public," says editor Mark Potok. "Today, it is recognized as an important weapon in the arsenal of those who defend democracy."

The magazine's groundbreaking journalism has prompted features on network and cable television, columns in newspapers ranging from The New York Times to small local papers, and notice in other respected venues. Features from the Report also have been reprinted in a large number of scholarly publications.

Some of the Report's recent stories show why it has received acclaim:

• In late 1998, the Report documented the white supremacist activities of the 15,000-member Council of Conservative Citizens, which had claimed to be a "mainstream" conservative group. The investigation revealed that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and other politicians had hosted the group's leaders and made speeches to its members.
  
  
• The Fall 1999 issue explored the development of "an underclass of white youths, in many cases buffeted by the winds of huge social changes and dislocations," that "is altering the face of American hatred." Analyzing the social and economic bases of hate, the issue received widespread national attention.
  
  
• In the fall of 2000, the Report examined the "neo-Confederate movement" composed of a variety of "pro-South" groups. Detailed evidence showed the League of the South, a large neo-Confederate organization dominated by university professors, to be a white supremacist hate group.
  
  
• Blood on the Border: The Anti-Immigration Movement Heats Up, published in early 2001, documented the rise of right-wing anti-immigrant rhetoric and accurately predicted further bloodshed to come. This comprehensive coverage of current anti-immigration groups became a critical resource for U.S. journalists.
  
  
• The Fall 2001 issue, Dangerous Liaisons: From Los Angeles to Moscow, Extremism Goes Global, was devoted to an investigation of the growing ties between U.S. and European extremists. The lead story, documenting the apparently illegal activities of a group called the American Friends of the British National Party, resulted in the implosion of the group and the deportation of its leader back to England.
  
  

The magazine has covered a wide array of other topics, including the use of the internet by hate groups; the development of white power music and its role in the movement; the decline of militias over the latter part of the 1990s; hate on university campuses; and the development of new radical ideologies, including a racist variant of neo-Pagan Odinism and the "pan-Aryanism" that today characterizes most European and American white supremacist organizations.

It has exposed the criminal backgrounds of principal Klan leaders, damaging Klan recruitment efforts, and even wrecked one neo-Nazi group by revealing its leader's partly Jewish heritage. It has taken on "academic racists" and violent anti-abortion zealots.

"We try hard to provide the public with a complete picture of the dangers posed by extremist groups and individuals," Potok says. "But our best work in recent years probably has been in exposing a number of major hate groups that have tried to masquerade as mainstream, if highly conservative, organizations. Americans need to understand what these deceptive groups are really all about."

The Intelligence Report won a prestigious design award in 1999 after converting to a full-color format from The Society of Publication Designers. In 2003, it also won a second-place Green Eyeshade Excellence in Journalism Award in non-deadline reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. As a result of the Report's reputation and expertise, its staffers have given everything from briefings for immigration intelligence officials to lectures to students in Vienna.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," an official with the city of Newark, N.J., wrote. "You guys are doing quite a lot."