Published: October 16, 2008 08:56 pm      

Klan using recycled mainstream newspapers to distribute anti-Obama message

EDMOND — Signs are emerging that groups actively alarmed about Barack Obama’s prospects for becoming the first African-American president are aggressively pressing their case against the Democratic candidate.

An appalling example is a white supremacist organization called the Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan. It has been piggybacking the group’s anti-Obama propaganda on the mainstream Ada Evening News and distributing it to homes there.

This unauthorized use of the newspaper has been going on under the cover of dark in Ada for two weeks, said publisher Loné Beasley. Subscribers have complained that old editions of the paper wrapped with the Klan material land on their doorsteps and they don’t like it.

“We have nothing to do with this,” Beasley said. “But there’s probably some confusion out there. We’ve asked our customers to bring any copies they get with this Klan stuff to our attention.”

The Ada Evening News is delivered daily to two-thirds of the homes in Ada, a mostly white community of 16,500 in the rolling hills of southeastern Oklahoma. The Klan is apparently getting old copies of the Evening News from local recycling centers, then redistributing them with the anti-Obama message.

Beasley said local police and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation are checking into the matter. A carrier for the newspaper said he witnessed old papers with the Klan material being thrown from an SUV that authorities are trying to track down.

Thomas Robb, national director of the Knights Party of the KKK, said he “does not discourage” Klan supporters from using recycled magazines and newspapers to facilitate distribution of the group’s message.

He also indicated it may be perfectly legal under the constitutional right of free speech.

“I’m not in Oklahoma,” he said. “But the newspaper company doesn’t own the newspaper once it is sold and recycled … the same as the publisher of a Stephen King book doesn’t own the King novel once it is sold at Wal-Mart.”

Robb made his comments in a phone interview from his KKK headquarters in Harrison, Ark. He referred a specific request to halt the use of its material as a wrapper around copies of the Ada Evenings News to the group’s attorney.

Small print at the bottom of the KKK propaganda states that “the attached newspaper/magazine is for weight purposes only and should not be considered an endorsement of this flyer of the Knights Party.”

That message signals that other unsuspecting newspapers and magazines also are being used as vehicles to distribute the Klan material.

What’s hurtful to the reputation of the media is the tone and content of the anti-Obama literature.

Cleverly, the Knights Party “press release” says it was intended to knock down an Internet rumor that the KKK has endorsed Obama for president, raising the question in a casual reader’s mind of whether the wrapper was a joke.

A fake news story claiming the KKK had endorsed Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton last February did make the Internet rumor mill at the time. The story originated on the British satire site called “The Daily Squib” (www.dailysquib.co.uk) and was clearly marked as “entirely fictitious.” Mainstream news organizations did not touch it.

But once you get by the humorous headline on the KKK release, the message is ugly, branding Obama a “traitor” and suggesting that his allegiance is to Africa rather than the United States.

“Barack Obama, if elected, will try to take the bread from our children’s mouths and send it to Africa,” the flier states.

All of it is pure trash aimed at causing white voters to reject Obama when they go into the quiet of the voting booth on Nov. 4. It also is indicative of the desperation of extremists as Obama’s appeal rises in the polls — even in traditionally Republican states.

WILLIAM B. KETTER is the vice president of news for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., owner of daily and weekly newspapers, including The Edmond Sun, magazines and Web sites in 26 states.