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Covington, Buzzfeed, and the End of Patience as a Virtue in America
The ability of social media to elevate the smallest of issues into national controversies has been well documented. But the past few days has done more to show the ability of social media in mutating stories into false narratives that do damage to the nation as a whole.
On Saturday, a group of students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky was on the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial, part of their trip to the nation’s capital to participate in the March for Life. They were met by numerous Progressive activists, including a number of African American Black Hebrew Israelite protesters, and several Native American activists. Among those activists were Omaha elder Nathan Phillips, who confronted the students while banging on his drum. The students then stood their ground and were later accused of taunting him and other participants. Philips later recounted that he became upset while watching the Black Hebrew Israelites make speeches. He stated that more and more Covington students arrived and were then “in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” according to Philips.
The story was quickly latched on to by mainstream media accounts on Twitter and elsewhere, and the story exploded from there.
If only that had been the full story.
As is the norm these days, more and more videos of the incident trickled out in the hours following the initial mob fury on Twitter. Slowly, one thing became more and more apparent: the story that the media had latched on, as told by Nathan Phillips, was at the very least inaccurate, and at worst, grossly disingenuous.
In an update on Reason.com Sunday, Robby Soave describes the different picture the new evidence, in totality, paints of what actually occurred:
Far from engaging in racially motivated harassment, the group of mostly white, MAGA-hat-wearing male teenagers remained relatively calm and restrained despite being subjected to incessant racist, homophobic, and bigoted verbal abuse by members of the bizarre religious sect Black Hebrew Israelites, who were lurking nearby. The BHI has existed since the late 19th century, and is best describes as a black nationalist cult movement; its members believe they are descendants of the ancient Israelites, and often express condemnation of white people, Christians, and gays. DC-area Black Hebrews are known to spout particularly vile bigotry.
Phillips put himself between the teens and the black nationalists, chanting and drumming as he marched straight into the middle of the group of young people. What followed was several minutes of confusion: The teens couldn’t quite decide whether Phillips was on their side or not, but tentatively joined in his chanting. It’s not at all clear this was intended as an act of mockery rather than solidarity.
One student did not get out of Phillips way as he marched, and gave the man a hard stare and a smile that many have described as creepy. This moment received the most media coverage: The teen has been called the product of a “hate factory” and likened to a school shooter, segregation-era racist, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. I have no idea what he was thinking, but portraying this as an example of obvious, racially-motivated hate is a stretch. Maybe he simply had no idea why this man was drumming in his face, and couldn’t quite figure out the best response? It bears repeating that Phillips approached him, not the other way around.
And that’s all there is to it. Phillips walked away after several minutes, the Black Hebrew Israelites continued to insult the crowd, and nothing else happened.
This is another example in a long line of embarrassing examples in recent years where journalists, whose primary job is to verify and prove the facts and truths of the situation, failed totally in their mission. CNN, the Washington Post, and other mainstream outlets led with the story, without ever truly verifying it. They quickly accepted a narrative they were biased into believing (that MAGA hat wearing white teenagers clearly were racists and the instigators) instead of spending even a few moments interviewing those same teenagers and getting a second viewpoint on what was clearly a contentious interaction on the National Mall.
And before I go too far out on a limb, I want to quickly admit I fully admit I don’t know if this is the full story as well. We could absolutely wake up 24 hours from now, and have a new narrative for the story.
But the inability of the mainstream press to do their due diligence in stories like this has become a cultural epidemic. In the 12 hours between the beginning of this controversy to the point where a factual push back started (started not by journalists, but average Twitter users who saw flaws in the initial story), people on Twitter, mostly from the political Left, started doxxing the students involved, started calling for violence against these kids, and were voicing the intention of activists to protest at their school, hopes that the students would be expelled. The intensity of the anger even caused the Covington local Catholic diocese to put out a statement denouncing the events, apologizing to Philips, and promising swift punishment to their students…punishment now that seems to be either unnecessary or in need of severe tempering.
If this had been the only episode this week where the media had rushed to judgment and fallen flat on its face, that would be bad enough. But this was at the very least the second episode of such incompetence in the last 24 hours.
The previous story had to do with Buzzfeed’s apparent blockbuster report this week, stating that they had rock solid, documented proof that President Donald Trump told his then lawyer Michael Cohen to lie in testimony to Congress, regarding his investments in Russia.
If true, this would be the first clear evidence that Trump had committed impeachable offenses; offenses that even his allies in the GOP would be hard-pressed to ignore.
For 24 hours, the liberal news networks poured over the various possibilities. Would Trump resign? Would Democrats impeach him in the next few weeks? Who were the Republican Senators who would cross party lines to convict Trump in the Senate, and oust him from office? The possibilities were endless.
Only one problem: the story seems untrue; or at the very least, flawed.
24 hours into the liberal political orgy, no less than our liberal hero of the moment, special counsel Robert Mueller, poured the largest bucket of ice water in recent political memory over the entire story.
Mueller’s office, in an unprecedented move, publicly rebuked the Buzzfeed story:
“BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
From the normally tight-lipped Mueller probe, who has been reticent to leak any detail of their investigation whatsoever, such a statement is profound, and had to be taken with a great amount of seriousness.
Moving past the facts of this case, the reality once again was journalists marching far out on a limb to promote a story that they themselves had not verified.
Both the Covington story above and the Buzzfeed story below illustrate this point; a point that time and again gets our media into trouble. The failure of journalists to rely on their own reporting skills, and their own ability to verify facts and details of stories, undermines their credibility.
The Buzzfeed story, because of its specifics, would be far harder for most journalists to verify; but even in that case, a little bit of patience before latching on to a story accusing the President of the United States of lying to obstruct justice might be well founded. In fact, a wise man would argue that the larger the accusation, the more reticent journalists should be in blindly accepting the basic underlying facts of the story.
The story about the Covington students, on the other hand, just simply shows the gross incompetence of our media personalities these days. Multiple outlets rushed to interview Mr. Phillips, in their absolute certainty that he was the victim. The possibility that a bunch of white teenagers bearing MAGA hats may not have been the culprits never dawned on them. And their blindness to that possibility prevented them from taking the simple step of calling these students and asking for their version of events. A short call would have allowed them to receive the videos that we now all have, that undermine the story Mr. Phillips initially told.
Of course, much of the blame for all this is the influence social media has not only on our journalistic class but on all of us as individuals. I fully admit that I sometimes react to stories far quicker than I would have if I never spent time on Twitter. We all must bear responsibility for those actions, which do a lot to undermine the fact-checking process in our society.
But journalists must also carry the majority of the blame. Their very raison d’etre is to be the professional class that verifies truth and facts objectively, with a calm, rational approach that puts aside emotional and personal interests in the cause for truth. They keep failing in this regard, and thus, continue to undermine the very profession they are trying to defend.
In this sense, our ancestors understood the reality better than we do. Patience used to be a commonly accepted virtue. Leo Tolstoy stated, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” In our modern society, we have given up both in lieu of speed and publicity. The rapid turnabout on social media undermines the wisdom garnered by being patient. Maybe all of us, especially journalists, should start to learn a little humbleness, and once again claim that virtue for our own benefit.
Published in General
If only it were just incompetence. The unilateral direction of the ‘errors’ speaks against that, regardless of (possibly) Napoleon’s dictum. The Journolist was publicly revealed. Do we really think that coordination has gone away? It’s conspiracy: the MSM is a functioning part of the left, and cannot be trusted for any story with even a vague political valence.
Clearly, the bias matters too, as I stated in my piece. Nobody thinks they would be so lackadaisical if the charge had been made against liberals. I mean…look at how the Women’s March’s antisemitism has been treated.
This is their teenage hero : Florida school shooting survivor and gun control advocate David Hogg is going to Harvard University.
Plus, whatever else happened, these are high school students. Have any of the people involved with this story ever met any 17-year-old boys??
I traveled for hockey with my son’s team for several years (incidentally, that “smirking” kid looks enough like Max to have made me pause for a second). These kids are full of juice.
Knowing the knuckle-headed things they can get up to because of their age, I think the behavior of these kids was remarkable. If I had been there, and this had been Max’s hockey team, I would have been very impressed with them.
Has this Indian dude never been around young men before? Wasn’t he one once? Was he so caught up in his protest zeal that he lost all of his supposed sage, august, native wisdom about the way of the world.
Then again, maybe he deserves some patience and respect too. He’s clearly aged, and passionate about his cause enough to be out there.
So he did his thing, the boys stood there and observed it. Neither side did anything. Again, nothing happened. The same “nothing’ must happen countless times at every rally like this, and, indeed, millions of times a day at any interaction between people.
Why are we watching this? Media, you guys are bad, bad news.
I’ve heard BHI speak and read their signs at Chinatown in D.C. They used to be there once a month on Friday. I just happened to be there on that day. They are racists.
The MSM is incapable of being embarrassed.
Thank you. (I had been wondering what this was all about.)
The race to be first, to have a scoop, has killed journalism. Many, if not most of the prominent ones do not seem to care about getting any of the facts right, let alone most of them, before going public with their ‘story’. They are rewarded for being first, not for being right, both by viewers and readers and monetarily. That is why I rarely watch ‘news’ shows anymore. I’ve never used Twitter and don’t plan to start, it doesn’t seem to be valuable when, on balance, I’d have to spend more time correcting the information that getting a false first impression.
This is one of the ugly things tearing us apart. We are being manipulated by those with agendas in ways that tear down civility. It happens on both sides of the aisle and from many different directions.We who are able to see through this charade need to speak up and call them out. Your article is a good step in the right direction. Thank you for posting.
He should feature prominently in the asian discrimination lawsuit.
I have become more and more convinced of two things:
Social media is the cigarette of the new age.
FIFY.
I chaperoned my son’s school trip to DC. Buying a MAGA hat at one of the cheapo t-shirt stores is a guaranteed way for them to show that, yeah, they actually were where they said they were. When I went to DC on a model Congress trip ages ago, we ran in to farmers from the National Agriculture Movement who had driven their tractors to DC. We talked politely and several of the farmers we spoke with gave us their hats. I still have mine. These boys will still have their MAGA hats 40 years from now.
Watching the boy who was having the drum beat literally in his face…he looked frightened at a few points. I question where the boys’ chaperones were. Nowadays, you don’t give a school group free time on the National Mall, you just don’t.
I wouldn’t have known that.
Not necessarily because the kids couldn’t handle it, but because the parents of these kids will come to school with their lawyers.
There must have been a chaperone at some point, because Sandmann said in his statement that he asked for permission to do their school chant.
Here is a video of the young students in expanded format, allowing one to see the evolution of the event instead of a short snippet cut for the purpose of distorting the reality of the event.
What is really funny is after being subjected to what these young kids thought, rightly so, was an experience of other worldly insanity, they ran with joy when their bus rolled up, shouting, “Let’s go home, Let’s go home!”
Come to think of it, I didn’t give kids free time in such settings when I took them on field trips back in the early 70s.
Question. At what point does this stuff become some sort of fraud, slander, libel?
Can anybody just say anything about anybody as long as they are liberal bashing a conservative? Because I am getting to the point that I am for unleashing the dogs of war and doing the same back. If this is the rules the Left wants to play by then lets kick this puppy and go for it. Lets start taking Left heads and scaring their families. Let them feel the pain.
Looks like somebody hacked the Ricochet account of Fake John/Jane Galt.
Every day, I gain a little more respect for what Aaron Sorkin was trying to tell us way back when. At the time it felt like he was making a stereotypical liberal show taking advantage of the stories of the day to bash conservatives. In retrospect, and with 20/20 hindsight, Sorkin’s reputation as a “typical Hollywood liberal” tended to mask the points he was really trying to make about the erosion of journalistic practices by all sides, including the so-called “good guys” like NPR.
The Newsroom also had an episode about CNN’s egregiously erroneous reporting during the Boston marathon bombing.
To be fair, Sorkin’s show still overpraised the old-timers like Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite. They were no saints when it came to journalistic ethics, but they had the luxury of a) duopoly and b) operating in the years before media literacy became a thing.
Still, with the benefit of hindsight, I think The Newsroom was underrated by conservatives, myself included. It targeted the laziness and corruption of the news media far more than it targeted conservative politics.
In order to win a libel or slander suit in the USA, the plaintiff has to prove that the defendant a) knew what they were reporting was untrue, and b) had malicious intent when they reported it. That’s incredibly difficult to prove.
This is what President Trump was referring to when he said that America’s libel laws need reform. He’d prefer that these laws were more like how they work in the UK, whereby one can be found guilty for reporting something one doesn’t know to be true. i.e. In the UK, libel is treated more like a form of negligence rather than a form of assault.
It would be pretty hard to get such a reform passed in the US without a constitutional amendment.
I would be opposed to those legal changes, personally. The problem is that we lap it up. We want them to report this stuff the way they do. Most of us, anyway. We want controversy, we want to be angry, we want to see what it is we are looking to see. The problem really is us.
The problem is not the law it is the convention. People no longer have the decency to not want to destroy their fellow man (woman / whatever) Trump’s law change while I understand his point would not work since our Federal level and many state level governments are ran by the Left the law would be weaponized to destroy the Right and ignored if used against the Left. This is how much of this law in this country works. The Right needs to be willing to fight dirty and get of their fainting couches and gut the Left in the worst ways possible until the Left understands it needs to reform.
That’s only for public figures (such as public officials, celebrities, etc.), and I doubt that the Covington boys would qualify as such. For an “average Joe,” one usually has to prove the defendant:
That’s not their raison d’etre. That’s their cover.
If the reform included making losers pays for costs, I’s be less concerned about the SLAPP effect.
Oh, it was not just the “mainstream media” that rushed to destroy a young Catholic boy’s life. National Review was happy to climb on board–sliming Catholics who were there for the annual March for Life–because they were wearing red MAGA hats, triggering National Review, which has still not truly apologized, and either fired or compelled a full, abject, unconditional apology from their poison pen wielding author.
Indeed, Nicholas Frankovich’s non-apology “apology” was immediately called out as such in the NR comments:
Only for public figures.
Standing on the street corner waiting for the bus doesn’t make one a public figure.
Besides I think there is also the reckless disregard for the truth, and in this case I think the actual malice is probably pretty easy to prove in a lot of cases.
Editor.
Indeed. Throughout the world, only in the US (and not before recent decades) has there been a belief in the myth of news media (paper, radio, television) having any raison d’être other than as servant of and promoter for a political agenda. Score that as another win for our subversive left.