Letters: ‘We All Need to Take Responsibility for Their Actions’
I Failed the Covington Catholic Test
On Friday, the March for Life, the Indigenous Peoples March, and a gathering of Black Hebrew Israelites converged near the Lincoln Memorial, where students from Covington Catholic High School encountered Nathan Phillips, an American Indian man. By Saturday, a video of the encounter—an apparent confrontation between the teenagers and Phillips—had gone viral. Soon after, though, more videos surfaced that threw into question the media’s initial portrayal of the high schoolers, many of whom had been wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, as menacing and disrespectful.
“As I watched the longer videos, I began to see the smirking kid in a different light,” Julie Irwin Zimmerman wrote on TheAtlantic.com this week. “If the Covington Catholic incident was a test, it’s one I failed—along with most others. Will we learn from it, or will we continue to roam social media, looking for the next outrage fix? Next time a story like this surfaces, I’ll try to sit it out until more facts have emerged.”
I read with great interest Ms. Zimmerman’s column; however, she saved the most notable point for the second-to-last sentence: “I’ll get my news from legitimate journalists instead of from an online mob for whom Saturday-morning indignation is just another form of entertainment.”
The main sources of misinformation for most were the well-respected and revered-on-the-left New York Times and Washington Post, whose employees are considered the ultimate legitimate journalists.
When the two leading newspapers of record sprint out in front promoting a false narrative, it speaks to an ingrained industry problem and failure. The immediate and , which should be above such standards, swallowed whole the narrative, and ignored the truth.
