When journalists can’t admit they were wrong

THE EMPHASIS IS NOT ON THE TRAGEDY BUT THE LIBERATION. — RAYMOND DE SOUZA

Journalists sometimes get things wrong when they cobble together history’s first draft. And when they do — liberals and conservatives alike — the blame often lies with ideological bias.

When right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik killed 77 Norwegians in 2011, for instance, The Wall Street Journal went to press with an editorial that appeared to blame the attack on Muslims. And when Iran accidentally shot down a Ukraine International Airlines plane and killed 176 people earlier this month, some progressive media outlets at first assigned credibility to Tehran’s ludicrous claim that the plane had suffered some unspecified mechanical problem that caused it to explode like a firecracker. Responsible media outlets correct the record and move on.

What’s more unusual is when journalists cling to their original, discredited reporting, even after the initial reports are clearly falsified. Yet as Robby Soave of Reason magazine shows, that is what happened a year ago, following the debunking of claims that racist students from Kentucky had aggressively taunted Native American activist Nathan Phillips during competing political rallies at the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 18, 2019. In fact, as subsequently released footage showed, the confrontation actually began when members of an anti- Semitic group called the Black Hebrew Israelites began taunting students from Covington Catholic High School, and Phillips interjected himself in the argument to ( by his own later account) protect the Israelites.

Following the disclosure of the new evidence on Jan. 20 of last year, journalists and politicians rushed to delete tweets that cast the high school students as the face of American racism. And earlier this month, Nick Sandmann, the student whose alleged “smirk” was seen in a widely publicized photo of the incident, settled a defamation lawsuit against CNN. Sandmann’s lawyer says more lawsuits are on the way.

But as Soave reports this week in Reason, there are some journalists who refused to acknowledge how badly the story had been botched. This included Ruth Graham of Slate and Laura Wagner ( then of Deadspin, now with Vice). The latter claimed that morally re- evaluating the events in light of new evidence should be avoided, since it would confer “undeserved sympathy to the privileged.” Other media, including the New York Daily News and NBC News, dug up non- sequitur claims about Covington as an apparent means to prop up the original suggestion that the school was a den of bigotry.

Taking Soave’s lead, I went back through prominent Canadian media, to see if we had our own Covington Truther contingent. What I found was a mixed bag: journalists who forthrightly acknowledged that the media got it wrong, along with those who remained mired in an alternate universe.

At the Toronto Star, for instance, Vinay Mernon wrote an exemplary piece on Jan. 21, 2019, titled “The teens maligned for allegedly mocking an Indigenous elder deserve an apology.” Yet a day later, the same publication ran a piece claiming that any discussion of the new exculpatory video evidence “misses the point.” We shouldn’t let the kids off the hook, apparently, because, truth be damned, “whatever the order of events, First Nations people will see in the image of a white high school student confronting an Indigenous Elder in Washington, D.C. the callous indifference and disrespect that are constants of their experience.” The Globe and Mail ran a similarly strange piece the next day, two days after the initial narrative had been debunked, credulously reciting Phillips’ own ( falsified) version of events.

In other cases, those who tried to salvage the racist- student narrative fell back on the fact that the Covington students were wearing red MAGA hats — which journalist Navneet Alang described to a CBC host, four days after the incident, as being “symbolic of misogyny and racism.”

Indeed, fear of a red hat became the standard fallback. On Jan. 25, 2019, a full five days after the truth was learned, a Maclean’s writer was using these hats as Exhibit A in a column insisting that this “mob of students from now- infamous Covington Catholic high school” was summoning the symbolic power of “hate groups (which) typically construct an extremist kinship through shared values, language, and an esthetic.” Not to be outdone, though he did not directly refer to the Covington controversy, a Canadian university professor insisted that such hats would one day be seen as akin to a “Ku Klux Klan hood or robe.” Such comparisons are ludicrous. But the red hats were now all leftist ideologues had on the Covington students.

Well, not quite all. At one point during the Lincoln Memorial protests, the students performed school- spirit sports chants, including one they’d learned with a Maori theme — which surely must be listed in the intersectional penal code as some kind of infraction. Then again, this whole melodrama played out just 15 miles from Fedex Field, home of the Washington Redskins. America has a blind spot when it comes to respecting native American culture, but that’s not something to blame on a bunch of high school kids from Kentucky — or their hats.

Here’s an admission: When I saw that now- iconic image of Sandmann facing off against Phillips a year ago, I saw what we all thought we saw: a smirking, privileged white kid disrespecting an older activist hailing from a disadvantaged minority group. But then I learned otherwise, and I took the whole series of events as a cautionary tale. The lesson is: wait for the whole story before you cobble together a moral narrative out of a single stillframe.

Oh, and when the truth does come out, don’t go double or nothing on the original lie.