Washington Post Makes Pathetic Attempt To Backpedal on Covington Kids over a Month Later
The Washington Post was the first major media organization to be hit with a massive lawsuit over its coverage of the Covington Catholic High School incident near the Lincoln Memorial back in January. It was hardly chump change, either — Covington student Nicholas Sandmann and his lawyers were looking to cost the Post $250 million.
As someone who has a very rough familiarity with these sorts of things, I figured this would end up getting settled for something in the area of, oh, 1/250th of that. Then again, I had the sneaking suspicion maybe the Jeff Bezos-owned Post may not be that intelligent or lucky. Witness, for instance, Bezos’ recent divorce settlement and the attendant stupidities that surrounded it.
Now, granted, the Covington Catholic case isn’t going to include anything quite as salacious as that Medium piece Bezos wrote about the National Enquirer having incriminating photos of him and then allegedly trying to blackmail him with them. However, trying to backpedal with the most tepid possible statement over a month after the paper botched its reporting and helped make national villains out of a bunch of teenagers is certainly up there.
On Friday at 5:17 p.m. — which is not at all the time you release a story you don’t want people to see or anything — the Post published a short snippet on the Covington Catholic debacle called “Editor’s note related to Lincoln Memorial incident.”
“A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial,” the piece read. “Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict.”
“The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos.”
“Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: ‘Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed’; ‘Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration’; ‘Investigation finds no evidence of “racist or offensive statements” in Mall incident,’” they continued.
“A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.”
In terms of the last part, they also issued a tweet acknowledging they’d deleted another tweet about Phillips’ “Vietnam service:”
The Post has issued an Editor’s Note about updates to its initial coverage of the Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial: https://t.co/rhzKZ1715K
We’ve also deleted this Jan. 19 tweet in light of later developments. For more, see the Editor’s Note. pic.twitter.com/O7qCSnBMPO
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 1, 2019
This is one of so many things involving the Covington Catholic debacle where you squint at it and rack your brain as to where you should begin. I suppose we can start with the fact that none of the salient details from “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed,” “Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration” or “Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident” are actually mentioned in this non-apology apology.
Now, granted, you can glean a lot from the headlines. However, important facts buried in those articles include (but certainly aren’t limited to) the role of the Black Hebrew Israelites in the conflict, the extent to which Phillips’ statements could be debunked by the footage or just how many “racist or offensive statements” were attributed to the Covington Catholic students that also turned out to be untrue.
Also unmentioned, and this is the root of the problem, is the rush to publish this story. Eighteen seconds of Twitter video was all it took for media outlets to latch onto this story like remoras on the belly of a shark — and, like remoras, they went wherever the shark took them. It didn’t take them to a very good place. They ended up reporting not on facts regarding the video, but on the controversy over the video. In journalistic terms, that’s a much bigger difference than you might think.
This is problematic in its own right but then you have to factor in the fact these writers, editors and other sundry gatekeepers almost certainly knew there was a good chance they were dealing with minors. They also knew there was likely other footage out there regarding the incident that could have given them fuller context to what was going on. Instead of waiting for it, they just went ahead and published, then shot off a follow-up story titled “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed.” That’s not how this is supposed to work.
According to Fox News, L. Lin Wood, the attorney for Nicholas Sandmann, agrees.
“Too little, too late,” the lawyer said in an appropriately short reply to the Post’s mea culpa.
Please don’t get us wrong here. We’re not against corrections. We issue them not infrequently, as does every publication worth its salt. But first of all, we make sure people know that what we’re issuing is a correction or retraction.
This isn’t that; it’s an “editor’s note.” The only thing specifically being called a correction here is the claim that Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. This is in spite of the fact that several of the things they mentioned in the article clearly deserve to be called corrections or retractions. Again, this is a much bigger deal than you might think, particularly when the Post is staring down the barrel of a $250 million lawsuit.
And then there’s the fact that this is coming in March — roughly a month and a half after the incident happened. And yes, I understand that February is a short month, but come on now. Every fact they’re acknowledging in this “editor’s note” has been known to the public since days after the video surfaced. What, precisely, has changed since then, other than the fact that The Washington Post now finds itself as a defendant? How can anyone take this seriously when it seems to only be prompted by the threat of litigation? All this does is make Sandmann’s case seem stronger.
I must want democracy to die in darkness, because there’s a part of me that wants the Post to get taken to the cleaners for the full quarter-of-a-billion dollars. Then again, I’m not stupid and I don’t think that, given Bezos’ phalanx of lawyers and the fact they probably never want this to see the inside of a courtroom, the smart money is on this being resolved over a table as opposed to in front of a jury and for significantly less money than the MSRP on the lawsuit.
Then again, there’s always the off chance that Bezos and the Post decide to self-destruct the same way Gawker did. And why not? They can’t even call a correction or retraction a correction or retraction. They don’t seem to understand the gravity of impugning teenage boys not yet of the age of majority. This is the equivalent of the politician who will only say “mistakes were made” as opposed to “I made mistakes.”
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