It is rare for news orgs to take criticism and publicly think it through, so, kudos to the @washingtonpost for that. But there is a larger problem here: the same white blind spots that lead media to ignore/down play rise of white nationalist groups also drove Trump coverage.
This is right here gets to the heart of the problem. Too many white journalists, like too many white American, only understand racism or dangerous racism to be the KKK. It must be explicit. Except white racists have been smarter than that literally since Reconstruction. 
We get literacy tests and grandfather clauses precisley to use “race-neutral” means of getting around the 14th and 15th amendments, yet white people and white courts and white journalists were fine w them because they were not explicitly racist. We see same patterns today.
You see this with the White Citizens’ Councils. The KKK’s blatant racism was too out there and these councils, made up of business men in suits who used educated rhetoric and respectability and carefully toned language to much more effectively maintain racial caste than KKK.
You see this with Lee Atwater and Nixon and Reagan, who all couch racist rhetoric and language in carefully coded race-neutral terms. And yet, white journalists keep making the same mistakes.
White journalists really need to examine their own investment in the myth that white racism is rare, that it comes only in the form of “backwards” fringe groups and how this prejudices their coverage, how it led them to dismiss and so *miss* the sentiment that propelled Trump.
Journalists should be skeptical. But we also should question where we are most incredulous of the facts and where bias comes in. How much of this belief that SPLC was going too far in labeling a think tank a hate group comes from personal discomfort with who’s considered racist?
Because history shows us that “science” and “think tanks” and “scholars” have all been used to legitimize white supremacy. This is not new. Neither is our racial gullibility.
