Harmon Leon - the Steven Glass of the Sacramento News & Review?

So I checked the web and sure enough an account of the same meeting "My Dinner at Applebee's With White Supremacists!" by Harmon Leon was published in the February 23, 2005 edition of the SF Weekly. I have nothing against authors reselling articles, but the rewritten SN&R article contains such severe discrepancies when compared with the SF Weekly version that it amounts to blatant lying and journalistic fraud against Sacramento News & Review readers.

This February there was an ugly incident of the distribution of racist fliers in several Sacramento neighborhoods advertising the National Alliance hate group. The fliers said "Love Your Race" under the picture of a white woman. In his SN&R cover story Leon claims he set up a meeting with the National Alliance in response to this incident: "Members of a racist organization peppered Sacramento neighborhoods with white-power pamphlets proclaiming love of their race. Our writer goes undercover in order to find out why they hate other races . . . Who are the faces behind the recent fliers?" asks Leon. "After going to the group's Web site . . . I e-mail the group about its next Sacramento-area meeting."

That's not what he said in the SF Weekly. In fact in his SF Weekly article Leon gave no reason for posing as a potential recruit to the National Alliance, other than that he wanted "to put a face on extreme hate, to find out the hobbies of haters, what haters find hot and what haters find not?" Whatever his reasons, Leon was plainly not motivated by any specific racist incident in Sacramento.

Another problem with Harmon's SN&R article concerns when exactly Leon began trying to set up a meeting with white supremacist groups. Even only considering what we're told in the SN&R article, there's something wrong. Leon seems to imply his dinner with the white supremacists took place sometime before mid to late January: "A week later, eerily sitting in my in-box is an e-mail: 'We should have our next meeting coming up mid to late January. I would like to meet with you in person before then.'"

Whenever the dinner was, this email in response to Leon's inquiries must have been sent before mid January. But the fliering incident that supposedly caused Leon to go undercover in the first place did not occur until February 15, 2005. This is according to the Sacramento Bee story that Leon himself quotes in his SN&R article: ". . . this fliering blitzkrieg was merely a public-relations ploy to get mainstream media attention. And it did work. The Sacramento Bee wrote a story, with the typical expected quotes ("I'm so damn mad") from people angry and outraged at the racism in the fliers."

Finally, in the SN&R cover story, Leon heavily implies that the first he ever heard of the Sacramento National Alliance fliers was after the distribution had already occurred and was reported in the Bee: "One morning, a fine morning, in February, residents throughout a Sacramento neighborhood awoke to find in their driveways a flier that said "Love Your Race," featuring the picture of a woman--a beautiful woman. No big deal," Leon writes.

Not so fast. In the SF Weekly Leon described in detail his conversation at Applebee's with three members of an unspecified hate group (it's unclear why he declined to identify which group in the Weekly but named the National Alliance in the SN&R), and one of the topics of conversation was the group's specific plan to distribute the "Love Your Race" fliers that eventually were distributed and caused outrage in Sacramento:

"We're going to be doing some fliering," Kevin explains, picking at his food. "We're going to be doing some big fliering this weekend; race fliers. It says '[hate group's name deleted]' with this picture of this blond woman, and it says 'LOVE YOUR RACE.' I know the media is going to jump all over that."

"I'm sure they will," I reply, knowing at least one member of the media who will be writing about it.

Along with the "Love Your Race" catchphrase, the fliers will denounce Martin Luther King Jr. and include anti-Semitic quotes from Richard Nixon and Henry Ford. It will be the largest literature distribution that this unit has ever undertaken, encompassing more than 10,000 fliers.

The leafleting is done in what they call drive-bys; the fliers are launched out of car windows onto random residential driveways.

In the SN&R version of the story, this whole part of the discussion with the National Alliance is simply cut, I assume because it was inconsistent with his supposed reason for infiltrating the group.

Consider the implications of this. For one thing it proves that Leon simply could not have been prompted to meet with the hate group because of the Sacramento fliers; that in fact Leon knew in advance that the fliering was planned and furthermore he knows exactly who did it — Kevin, the White Supremacist he met at Applebee's. So why does he pretend in the SN&R cover story that he doesn't know who did the fliering?

What went wrong here? The charitable explanation for Leon's errors is that the piece essentially fell apart when it was rewritten for SN&R. But I don't think so. Saying that he started looking into these hate groups because of the Sacramento fliering incident when the truth according to the SF Weekly version was that he had already met with the National Alliance and had himself been specifically recruited to do the fliering, is nothing other than a deliberate lie. As for why Leon would lie like this, I imagine it was probably easier to pitch the old article to the SN&R with a newsworthy Sacramento angle.

I don't want to be misunderstood. I believe journalists should report on and expose sick hate groups like the National Alliance. But journalism also has a duty to the truth and to not discredit itself by repackaging old stories and blatantly inventing a local angle for a story that didn't even exist when it was written. Leon had a pretty good story. Too bad he's full of it.