It’s amazing, the difference a $250 million defamation lawsuit can make.
The Washington Post published an editor’s note Friday evening admitting, way too late, that it badly bungled its coverage of the Covington Catholic High School story.
Major newsrooms, including the Post, falsely reported in January that a group of Covington Catholic High School students had abused and taunted an elderly Native American protester, Nathan Phillips, after the March for Life in Washington, D.C. The students did no such thing, as publicly available video showed. Sadly, the truth of the matter came out only after the press, most especially the Post, had already spread a narrative based entirely on vicious falsehoods.
On Friday, the Washington Post Staff published the following note — which is behind a paywall:
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.
The teens abused no one. They mistreated no one. Yet, they were treated like monsters all the same, and all because newsrooms couldn’t be bothered to double-check whether there was a longer, uncut version of the viral footage that had sparked this especially grotesque news cycle. The Covington boys were pilloried, publicly condemned by even their own bishop, and threatened with violence. One student in particular, Nick Sandmann, received the brunt of the hate because he is the most visible of the teens captured in footage of the incident.
Unedited tapes of the confrontation between Phillips and the Covington students show the teens were accosted first by Black Hebrew Israelites, a loathsome fringe hate group. The footage also show that it was Phillips who approached the students, not the other way around.
Sandmann filed a defamation lawsuit against the Post in early February, seeking $250 million in damages — the same amount the Post’s owner, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, paid for the newspaper in 2013.
