There’s something ironic about journalists criticising children with an enormous megaphone and yet maintaining that they are on the side of the powerless.
Consider a recent Washington Post column by Jonathan Capehart, entitled “Time to take on the Covington ‘smirk’”. He reassured readers that their first impressions about the Covington affair were right all along – this, despite the ample video evidence that the students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky were not responsible for sparking off the now-infamous confrontation with the Native American activist Nathan Phillips, which also involved members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, during the March for Life in Washington, DC.
Other writers, including Erik Zorn of the Chicago Tribune and Politico columnist Jack Shafer, used the word “revisionist” to describe people who raised questions about the initial narrative, which depicted the students, who wore red Make America Great Again hats, as aggressors. Adam Serwer of The Atlantic, meanwhile, took issue with the “sweeping counternarrative” exonerating the boys.
Serwer says that he is interested in preserving public trust in journalists. Yet some may question whether his advice will be especially useful in this regard. “It is an understandable impulse to want to repair a relationship with an estranged audience – news is about informing the public, and you can’t inform the public if a large segment of it doesn’t trust you,” he notes. “But the only goal that really matters is getting it right. The overcorrection is not about getting it right; it is about convincing people who will never trust the media to trust the media.”
Civil society only works when we are able to arrive at common truths. The philosophical frameworks of many journalists, especially those on the left, foreclose that possibility by presuming a hierarchy of privileged and disprivileged voices. In Nathan Phillips’s case, he is ipso facto disprivileged because he belongs to a historically oppressed minority group, and therefore his narrative has been accepted by many almost unconditionally.
The Holy Father’s 2018 World Communications Day message on “fake news” now reads like a prophetic description of the Covington affair, in its reference to stories that “grasp people’s attention by appealing to stereotypes and common social prejudices, and exploiting instantaneous emotions like anxiety, contempt, anger and frustration”.
I spoke to Dr Wilfred Reilly, a professor at Kentucky State University, about the growing mistrust of news outlets.
“Journalists need to understand that their job is to do journalism,” he said, and to “obtain a solid, definite ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘where’, and ‘how’. It took me 30 seconds to find unedited videos from all three parties [the Native American activists, Black Hebrew Israelites and Covington boys]. It’s reasonable to expect the media to do due diligence”.
The Covington kids, he said, “stood their ground which seems to have been their great sin according to some of the left-wing press”.
Dr Reilly has written a book about hate crime hoaxes, out next month from Regnery, which seeks to understand the phenomenon of fake racial incidents. He sees the confrontation involving his fellow Northern Kentuckians as one of a “large number of non-stories that have become national stories because of a media that happens to be looking for narratives of racial conflict”.
But he also noted that one thing that distinguishes the Covington kids’ response is that they immediately lawyered up and are contemplating suing media outlets which they believe libelled them. (“I was glad to see that,” Dr Reilly remarked.) But it was not only journalists sprinting to meet deadlines who misjudged the Covington incident. Some Church officials did too.
The Diocese of Covington initially blamed the students for the clash. It said: “We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, DC.
“We extend our deepest apologies to Mr Phillips. This behaviour is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”
But last week Covington Bishop Roger Foys issued a apology. “We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it,” he said. “I especially apologise to Nicholas Sandmann and his family as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal.”
How could officials who share both a faith and geographical location with the Covington boys have made such an error? According the bishop, they felt “bullied and pressured” by the media. But there may be a lesson here that, on some occasions, the mainstream media is best ignored.
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