Said Todd McMurtry, an attorney for the Covington Catholic schoolboy Nick Sandmann, quoted in Reason.
I read WaPo's statement as basically a defense of its own coverage, as it took place in real time. It reads:
A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. 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 statementcontradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statementcondemning 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.”
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.
Posts
80 comments:
What a meaningless mish mash. Would that be what we call a word salad? I don't see the party that says wapo's coverage was wrong. I don't see the party that says the kids are alright.
There should be additional punitive damages assessed for this...I don't even know what to call it. It's offensive and dishonest.
I feel like the autocomplete function messed up my Who reference. Part,not party. Both times.
WaPo tries to say it screwed up big time without saying it screwed up big time because its big time screwup is going to cost it big time money.
What’s the old saying? Never get into a fight with an outfit that buys stink by the barrel?
The statement doesn't even mention Sandmann by name.
He's just a high school student.
How lawyerly.
Everyone else was wrong. We just reported what they said. That's the defense they've chosen.
Unfortunately, for them it wasn't the video of Sandmann that called him racist, privileged, smug, or repeated the meme.
It took layers of editors and fact checkers at the WAPO to do that.
A la lanterne!, say the sans-culottes.
Over at Reason, they include a WaPo statement that their coverage of the unfolding of the story was accurate. As though their coverage of the unfolding of the story were somehow seperate from their coverage of the story itself.
My only regret is that they can't be sued into bankruptcy.
The leftist media knew what they wanted the facts to be and wrote their articles to match. They didn't check facts and knowingly lied. But they also personally attacked the young man and his school classmates smearing them as physically aggressive racist bigots. It was a purposeful and malicious attack against their primary enemy, "privileged" white men. Our libel laws should give legal recourse in this situation. If they don't they need changed.
"Over at Reason, they include a WaPo statement that their coverage of the unfolding of the story was accurate."
??? The same WaPo statement is included in my post.
WaPo is being sued for $250 million, so I don't think they want to admit what they wrote was libel. If they say they got the facts wrong with respect to anything that bears on the boys' reputation, they'd be bolstering the plaintiffs' case against them. They really can't do that except at the same time as the case is settled with all the plaintiffs.
Sorry, proof. I'm on my phone because the iPad is in the bedroom, where my wife still sleeps. I looked for it in your entry but didn't see it. It looked like they had more stuff.
Well, WaPo has to say something, right? So they are going with, "We covered fast-moving events in a way that was inaccurate, prejudiced, bigoted, and heedless of the consequences to the people we targeted, but that's standard journalism practice. Democracy dies in darkness."
Dr. Guillotine has a few ideas for you, Mr. Bezos.
"A further illustration of the difference between ritual concerns and substantive ones comes from occasions of accident in which the carelessness of one individual is seen as causing injury or death to another. Here there may be no way at all to compensate the offended, and no punishment may be prescribed. All that the offend[er] can do is say he is sorry. And this expression itself may be relatively little open to gradation. The fact - at least in our society - is that a very limited set of ritual enactments are available for contrite offenders. Whether one runs over another's sentence, time, dog, or body, one is more or less reduced to saying some variant of ``I'm sorry.'' The variation in degree of anguish expressed by the apologizer seems a poor reflection of the variation in loss possible to the offended. In any case, while the original infraction may be quite substantive in its consequence, the remedial work, however vociferous, is in these cases still largely expressive. And there is a logic to this. After an offense has occurred, the job of the offender is to show that it was not a fair expression of his attitude, or, when it evidently was, to show that he has changed his attitude to the rule that was violated. In the latter case, his job is to show that whatever happened before, he now has a right relationship - a pious attitude - to the rule in question, _and this is a matter of indicating a relationship, not compensating a loss_"
_Relations in Public_ ``Remedial Interchanges'' p.117-118
They didn't say they were sorry.
That is, their claim is that they've had a right attitude to news all along.
Unanswered by the WaPo: Why they thought any of this was a news story in the first place. Why they thought the kids were a worthy target of national derision.
I hope Lin Woods is able to discover the PR firm that planted this story in the first place and go after them.
WaPo was sent a letter by the lawyers to retract their false reporting long after it was common knowledge their reporting was false.
They refused. They got sued.
They weren't negligent. They were defiant.
So what the The War Cry of the Progressives was chanted by WaPo. It is their paper and they can lie if they want to. And Sandman is a creepy white male Christian believer. Ergo: he is the Movement's legitimate target for their team of high level paid liars and fake news propagandists. So what if he is destroyed or killed by their efforts, that is the way a War usually works out.
Now go out there WaPo people and let's finish strong. Kill the White Boys. Kill the White Boys. Kill the White Boys.
Some Life Long Liberal said...WaPo’s statement is at least better than Trump
Then, Amadeus 48 said...
Well, WaPo has to say something, right? So they are going with, "We covered fast-moving events in a way that was inaccurate, prejudiced, bigoted, and heedless of the consequences to the people we targeted, but that's standard journalism practice. Democracy dies in darkness."
You see; When you're a Life Long Liberal, Truth doesn't matter; in fact, you'll Proudly BRAG about Smearing those on the Right.
smear
[smir]
VERB
damage the reputation of (someone) by false accusations; slander.
Link to WaPo Statement is not working, though it is reproduced in full in Althouse's post, so there's no extra meat on that bone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/01/editors-note-related-lincoln-memorial-incident/?utm_term=.0da9b4477230
To paraphrase, "First we passed on unsubstantiated claims by a charlatan, then we decided to apply journalistic standards."
I really feel bad for the WaPost. No, I really do. Honest, I do. A small town little newspaper, just trying to report the facts, while being hounded by aggressive, unethical lawyers and their MAGA Hat wearing clients. They are demanding 250 Million pounds of journalistic flesh.
Democracy really does die in the darkness. Freedom of the Press is at stake, people!
The kids looked boisterous. If you're told that their rowdiness was in celebration of racial superiority, they look hateful. Isn't that why it is incumbent to find out the truth rather than take, uncontested, the word of an activist? The WaPo reported their own biases and continue to do so. Fuck them......The WaPo better pray than someone with my mindset doesn't get on the jury.
This attack on journalism is the most serious threat to democracy to date, is it not?
Or, as CNN would put it--This is an apple dying in darkness.
It is true about a lack of options for gradations of apologies to persons.
In part this is so because apologies are occasions for further attack, as Althouse points out.
In earlier times such disputes had more options for resolution, and gradations. In some places it could be displaced as a seeking of forgiveness from God, being as these are sins as well as insults. The staff of the WaPo, for instance, could confess, to a priest in Catholic confession, and perform the penance he would impose.
The lot of them climbing the National Cathedral steps on their knees would be a teaching moment.
But now there are no priests, but lawyers and judges, and only money matters.
The Washington Post’s legal argument is going to be that every man, woman, and child with a MAGA cap is a public figure.
Bezos wife doesn’t want the Post in her divorce.
If the Post wanted to make amends, they could do a lengthy article about how news media got suckered by guys like Nathan Phillips. Why didn’t anyone check his military service before? Why does anyone take the guy’s word on anything?
Same with Al Sharpton. Guy is a proven liar.
Remember they deplatformed don Shipley that tells you all you need to know, of course phollips ties to Sheehan and Sharpton are worthy of note.
Stop the back and forth!
Don't name the person you are disagreeing with.
Talk about substance. You have got to end this back-and-forth syndrome.
I am deleting ALL of it. STOP! You are wasting my time making me deal with this. That's not what this platform is for.
I cant say for certain, but I think the celebration of moloch in Virginia was coming down the pike and this was a preemptive strike.
True Sheehan has been involved with indigenous peoples briefly but primarily anti American projects.
MayBee at 6:40 AM
Unanswered by the WaPo: Why they thought any of this was a news story in the first place. Why they thought the kids were a worthy target of national derision.
Yes, The Washington Post should answer those questions.
"A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial"
This is true only if by "reported" they mean "propagated a smear without any attempt to ascertain the facts."
Scott Johnson at Powerline:
"What the Post is doing here may be governed by the possible application of this Kentucky statute to the case. Under the statute, a newspaper can mitigate defamation damages if it publishes “a fair summary” of plaintiff’s statement of the facts following a demand made 10 days prior to commencement of the lawsuit. My guess is that the Post didn’t want to take a chance it might lose the benefit of the statute in this case."
Link to statue not included.
mccullough at 8:32 AM
If the Post wanted to make amends, they could do a lengthy article about how news media got suckered by guys like Nathan Phillips.
Yes, The Washington Post should publish such an article.
A reminder of who we are dealing with
https://romeroinstitute.org/team/daniel-sheehan
He spread his category largely in hollywood, the subtext of lethal weapon, the subject of above the law, but he couldn't anoe a Miami judge
It wasn't an error. It wasn't a mistake. That's why it took six weeks to reply. They ran their options through their corporate lawyers, turned it inside and out to see if they were vulnerable, then decided that issuing that shitty bitch-ass mean culpa would cover them from liability. Weasels.
Remember it was the proprietor of this publicaltion who tried to blame sundry partners for the revelation of his dirty laundry
Publication, so this doesn't come close, but maybe they think they can get out of it as NBC did in Sanford, even with malice a forethought.
How do I know because they aired the unedited tape first.
As pointed earlier one of their stringers who who had wished that smollett's charge was true, was a fmr Obama staffer and interior department official.
We published accurately the Twitter opinion of the matter.
What we published was corroborated by BuzzFeed.
We followed good journalistic practice.
So the bulwinkle hired the daughter of stalinist hagiographer Howard fast and the lady Erica Jong.
Sorry the granddaughter of same, so this panjandrum for the better part of three years has been about nothing.
Two interesting things:
1. It took the filing of a lawsuit to generate even this weak, ambling defense more than a month after the fact. It boils down to "mistakes were made."
2. The amount claimed by the plaintiff(s) is $250 million, exactly the amount Jeff Bezos paid for the Post when he bought it from the Grahams in 2013.
The usual procedure when you have made a colossal mistake, in a published report or in life, is to do whatever you can to make a full correction immediately, and also to apologize if you have mischaracterized an individual person. This is good for your blood pressure and for your credibility.
Nothing Burger. Only you people care. Case dismissed.
In other news:
https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2019/03/02/a-tour-with-an-invoice/
No, the case is not dismissed. Indeed, I believe there are a dozen or more lawsuits in the works on this matter. Hopefully some individuals in Hollywood will be sued as well. For the plaintiffs one hopes for a Lottaburger.
I too read the WaPo text as a non-apology; reading these comments gives me a bit of hope that WaPo is actually going to have to pay dearly for their nonsense. Mr. Bezos can afford to pay whatever the damages may be of course but the fantasy of WaPo becoming the 'Sandmann family-owned WaPo' is amusing.
Well. The WAPO IS the gretest high school newspaper in the country. I doubt it can scrape together 250 million.
Blogger Charlie Currie said...
Scott Johnson at Powerline:
"What the Post is doing here may be governed by the possible application of this Kentucky statute to the case. Under the statute, a newspaper can mitigate defamation damages if it publishes “a fair summary” of plaintiff’s statement of the facts following a demand made 10 days prior to commencement of the lawsuit. My guess is that the Post didn’t want to take a chance it might lose the benefit of the statute in this case."
Link to statue not included.
I posted the statutory citation in my first comment which looks to have been deleted. The cite is K.R.S. § 411.051; it bars plaintiff from recovering punitive damages when there has been timely compliance with a written request for a retraction.
Ann Althouse said...
Stop the back and forth!
Don't name the person you are disagreeing with.
Talk about substance. You have got to end this back-and-forth syndrome.
I am deleting ALL of it. STOP! You are wasting my time making me deal with this. That's not what this platform is for.
Ann doesn’t care about the forth.
The wapo and leftists have been dishing out the forth for decades.
It is the back she doesn’t like. Cruel neutrality means a dialogue where all the beautiful people talk about those nasty deplorables and their racist racism and the deplorables get no reply.
Remember we must avoid the temptation to say anything negative about Nathan Phillips and Christine blasey Ford is credible.
Everything was so much easier in Ann’s little bubble when Democrats were in charge and those deplorable people didn’t talk back.
Mistakes were made. Understandable mistakes about that thing we vaguely remember. You know... that incident. Anyway, hope that satisfies you.
/s/Jeff Bezos
The WaPoo's statement is crap. Unsurprisingly. I find what the WaPoo prints is crap.
Because it may be a fine point with respect to the Sandmann case, I just wanted to note that while I chose the word “retraction” just above, the Kentucky statute speaks to “correction” and defines “correction” specifically.
Lin wood is the highlander of defamation law, will Bezos be using house counsel?
Jeff Bezos and the WaPo aren't sorry they printed the story, they're just sorry the Covington Boys had enough pull to hire a good libel lawyer and sue them. If it'd been some rednecks from Georgia - without $$ or connections - the WaPo would've said nothing.
What did isikoff say 26 years ago, before he hit the big time 'poor, ignorant and easy to control' so nothing new under the sun.
Again. Everybody go to the Althouse Blog Archive, on the right side of the screen a bit below her picture. Click on 1/13. The first post that comes up is the "Deep Snow Cafe." At 9:39 steve uhr complains about a "Depressing video of punks wearing maga hats harassing native [sic] Americans. I’m sure trump [sic] had no influence on their behavior." Some of us ask for a link, but steve uhr owns up to not knowing how to use the HTML a tag to set up a hot link. Kudos to Original Mike for speculating that it is a false flag operation (though what it was was a misleading editing operation), and shame to steve uhr for saying "No way."
Mr. uhr finally tells us how to get on YouTube and find the video, and a bunch of us take him up on it. And we find not only the short video that CNN was pushing, but a longer video (at the time I looked it was #4 in the list returned by following steve uhr's search directions) that totally blew the narrative out of the water.
My point being that as of 11:00 Eastern time the real, longer, video was already out there and yet the Post (and steve uhr) ignored it and relied on an obviously highly edited video (and probably CNN's reporting) for their story. That they fell for it was one thing -- shame on them for not doing the journalistic research that they claim to do -- but that they didn't retract the story the next day smacks of actual malice.
I doubt [The Washington Post] can scrape together 250 million.
@Rusty, Jeff Bezos could cough up four times that and not notice he had spent it.
Summing up:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/03/the-week-in-pictures-cohen-head-edition.php
Be sure to patronage the Bezos Dollar general store through the Althouse passage to consumption Nirvana.
Alt house. It is impossible in a comment section that does not support threads, which is your choice, to respond without identifying who or what you are responding to. I have to name YOU in this comment or it won’t make any damn sense.
So stop just telling us not to name commenters. You need to distinguish the vacuous squabbling from the threads of discussion, but your simple minded rule won’t do that.
Some blog templates allow threads. That reduces confusion.
FFS Althouse, you name commenters all the damn time. By your own rules, stop telling Achilles he is lying about you.
As the Nathan Phillips-Covington boys encounter was occurring it was being recorded and streamed live to I think an Instagram account.
Anyone watching that would have seen a torrent of extraordinary verbal abuse being directed at these high school students by left-wing activists over a prolonged period of time, which the high school kids, displaying a degree of self-control far beyond that of left-wing activists and journalists, largely did not respond to. They would also have seen Nathan Phillips thrust himself into the scene and push his drum and body in the face of these boys.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect these journalists to have been watching the event as it happened, but they didn't write their so-called news articles as it happened, they were written much later, and by the time those articles were written it would have been easy to have discovered that recordings of what had occurred existed and to track them down. And in particular since the articles were allegedly justified by a short excerpt from one of those recordings.
Did these journalists wonder if a short excerpt might be easy to misinterpret and that therefore they should see a bit more before rushing to judge? Or did they relish the opportunity to deliberately misconstrue an event to create a propaganda scene that would be believed by tens of millions, while only tens of thousands later likely would ever discover evidence to the contrary? (I suspect the latter scenario by the way since a similar malicious and malignant reporting event is occurring and reoccurring more or less every week and probably every day. But we don't see it every day because it is too much to pay attention to.)
But either way, whether it was a false narrative constructed knowing that it was false, or it was a false narrative constructed with the knowledge that it could easily be false and then doing absolutely nothing to check whether it was true or not, either way this is an extraordinarily ugly behavior.
The guiltiest parties in this whole ugly scene are the journalists.
I think the Washington Post, and other news organizations, should pay a steep fine and I think that this is a real opportunity for Jeff Bezos to fire every person at the Washington Post that participated in this deceitful, malignant hate crime and improve the Washington Post substantially by that act.
The following is a duplicate of something I posted on Legal Insurrection, with one obvious change. I will start by stating my hope that Ann Althouse, who writes this blog, sees my comment and will reply. Just as with William Jacobsen of Legal Insurrection, I have a high regard for Ms. Althouse's analysis and acumen, and would really be interested in her reaction.
I am a former professional journalist who practiced at a time when that label actually meant anything. I went to journalism school in the 1970s -- at UW-Madison, no less -- and as part of my education I studied the law of mass communication, including defamation, "false light," and invasion of privacy. I am very strongly on the side of Nick Sandmann, who I think has been seriously damaged by the coverage of the Lincoln Memorial incident.
However, the more spadework I do, the less convinced I am that he will recover damages. I sincerely hope I am wrong, and that he wins a series of whopping jury verdicts, or that he walks away with comfortable out-of-court settlement money. But I think he will be on shaky legal ground. He's a Kentucky resident, so I presume that's where his cases will be filed and heard. I would point to a similar case there, Sam Cromity vs. Terry Meiners and Clear Channel Communiucations (2015.)
Cromity was a police officer who gave a speeding ticket to Meiners, a radio talker. Meiners went on the air and called Cromity a liar, a troubled public servant, and other nasty stuff. The lower court dismissed Cromity's defamation-false light claim, and the state court of appeals (Kentucky's supreme court) upheld the dismissal, ruling that Meiners's statements were protected opinion.
I suspect that Meiners was helped by having been acquitted of traffic violation; how much that mattered, I don't know because I didn't read the whole case. Still, there is very broad protection for opinion, and most of what was said and published about Sandmann was opinion. That said, there is one aspect to these cases that I'd like to see Sandmann's lawyers examine in discovery: exactly how the incident got as much media coverage as it did.
The reports have made it appear that the focus was the result of some mysterious "going viral" process. That might be true, but I am skeptical. One reason for my skepticism is that, after I left journalism for the financial sector, one of my employers hired a p.r. firm to represent me. Because of their contacts, I was on the call lists of all the big outlets.
My name appeared in the WSJ, NYT, WaPo, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, USA Today, and a bunch of specialized publications. I made a bunch of TV appearances too. My point is that you don't get into the media without an intermediary. My hunch is that the people who went after Sandmann had pre-existing media contacts, possibly facilitated by p.r. outfits.
Even if Sandmann never recovers a nickel, I think it'd do us all a service if his lawyers, as part of the discovery process, would zero in on the process by which this became such a big story to begin with. As part of this discovery, his lawyers should probe the links between the so-called Hebrew Israelites and Nathan Phillips, the so-called "tribal leader."
I suspect they will learn that Phillips and the Israelites were well-acquainted before the incident, and that the entire encounter might have been planned and coordinated in advance, and that the media aspect was set up through pre-existing contacts. There is a lot to explore here, even if there's no big price tag attached. My hunch is that, defamation aside, there is plenty that the Washington Post and other media and celebrity outlets would like us not to know.
The Covington Affair had three motives. One, to indulge in diversity, and paint a class of people (i.e. masculine male, white, Catholic) with an unprincipled, broad stroke. Two, to cover-up the assembled's message to end age discrimination, summary judgments, and cruel and unusual punishment as a viable qualification of social progress or social justice. Three, to further the close association between sex and rape... rape-rape, and the ethical, quasi-moral justification for elective abortion. They like to pick off the guys from the gals in the pro-human rights, pro-science assembly.
Hopefully, the WaPo loses the lawsuit and is forced to pay reparations to the Covington boys. A heartfelt apology from Bezos would help as well.
If Sandman, a minor, had a gun a murdered Phillips,media would have blurred his photo and withheld his name.
Placeholder said...I went to journalism school in the 1970s -- at UW-Madison, no less --
Then perhaps you knew Annie Laurie Gaylor.
WaPo dies in lies
It's not that the newspaper should be sued into bankruptcy -- they should be sued into ownership change. For all we know, the assholes who tried to destroy the boys' reputations are still working for the paper and perhaps were even rewarded for their efforts because it fit with the newspaper's mission of getting Trump. This all should end.
"Democracy Dies In Darkness" ...and we buy Darkness by the barrel!
Then perhaps you knew Annie Laurie Gaylor.
Oh yeah. Both she and her mother were whackjobs before whackjobs were cool.
Nothing Burger. Only you people care. Case dismissed.
Isn't it cute how Howard thinks his ox will never be gored.
Ann Althouse said...
Stop the back and forth!
Hear, hear. In years past I participated in this nonsense and I always ended up feeling soiled afterward. In any thread longer than 100 comments there is a precise point when everything goes to hell, when wit and trenchant commentary disappear to be replaced by name calling and puerile pique. Regarding the worst offenders, I could name names, but that would run against Althouse's dictum, wouldn't it? You know who they are. They know who they are. They should grow up and stop devaluing one of the best forums on the internet.
“Alt house. It is impossible in a comment section that does not support threads, which is your choice, to respond without identifying who or what you are responding to. I have to name YOU in this comment or it won’t make any damn sense.”
Wrong. You just quote what you need to respond to. See? I’m doing that now.
“So stop just telling us not to name commenters. You need to distinguish the vacuous squabbling from the threads of discussion, but your simple minded rule won’t do that.”
It’s my blog and it will be done my way. Ridiculous to tell me what to stop doing.
“Some blog templates allow threads. That reduces confusion.”
I hate threaded comments. They’re an unreadable mess. To my eye! And it’s my blog.
"Democracy Dies in Darkness" is not a warning, it's an aspiration.
I find the new demands on comments from the blog owner puzzling. It appears to this neutral objective observer that the blog hostess has promoted the flame wars by crafting a daily feast of prime red meat to trigger racist, envious, hateful, LGBTQIA-phobic diatribes.
Typical female privilege blaming the Pavlov's dogs when they drool after she rings the dinner bell.
Gosh Howard wants the bubble, that every other outlet in the state provides except for anothet.
Like the federalist or the daily caller or the three house, those are the exceptions
You people inside da deplorabubble, nabisco. I'm just visiting the zoo and tapping on the glass
Well the ap wire almost always omits or ignores the actual details when they dont make it out of whole cloth, like the bit about the king bust
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