http://www.conservapedia.com/Oklahoma_City_BombingMedia reporting
Following the Oklahoma City bombing the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left activist group led by Morris Dees, gave the FBI a list of several thousand alleged members of militias and “hate groups” culled from its files. None of them had anything to do with the bombing. These names came from letters to newspapers expressing patriotic and conservative political views, lists of “members” supplied by informants, names from license plate numbers collected outside public meetings, pilfered mailing lists, and so on.
During the early days of the media feeding frenzy following the bombing, militia organizations were widely suspected and even charged with complicity in the crime. Watchdog groups were regularly quoted by the media as “experts” on the militias and made fantastic claims of vast membership and influence. Militias had absolutely nothing to do with the bombing, but the incredible media onslaught had a part in further marginalizing them, and changing their composition in the process.
Writer Adam Parfrey observed after the Oklahoma City bombing some watchdog groups information was absorbed whole into mainstream news sources as unimpeachable and objective news sources, whereas the watchdog organizations coffers bulged when constituent donors were led to believe through fundraising newsletters they were fighting an enemy of enormous evil and mounting strength. Despite their altruistic claims, the watchdog organizations
“ profited directly off the sensationalism that acts as a sparkplug for Hollywood and the weekly tabloids. <5> ”
The SPLC’s Klanwatch Intelligence Report of June 1995 claimed that “over 200 militia and support groups operate nationwide.” <6> Three months later, in September 1995 the SPLC issued a report that identified seventy-three “militias or militia support groups nationwide, with a total of 30,000 to 40,000 members.” The SPLC also claimed that about forty-five have “ties to the Ku Klux Klan.” <7> 127 “militia and support groups” suddenly disappeared. The actual number of militia group is believed no more than 20% of what SPLC claimed, and the Anti-Defamation League claimed only 10,000 members. <8>
As for militia complicity in the bombing itself—after more than three years of intensive investigation neither the FBI nor any other law enforcement agency has produced evidence that the perpetrators were members of or in any substantial way connected with any militia, anywhere, anytime. <9> A county grand jury arrived at the same conclusions. <10> No militias were implicated by government prosecutors at Timothy McVeigh’s or Terry Nichols’ trials. Militias had nothing to do with the Oklahoma City bombing. The perpetrators were acting entirely on their own. The only organizational “links and ties” they shared was service in the U. S. Army.