Thread by @DrewHolden360

The Covington Catholic smearing still matters.

Yes, it’s a case study in the danger of rushed judgement, especially when it confirms your priors. But it’s also a case study in the lack of accountability in the media & on the left.

Thankfully the internet is forever
🧵🧵🧵

To start, I cut A LOT of slack here. No need to pile on when someone apologized, even half-heartedly.

But the problem is that lots of people didn’t apologize, or even correct the record.

Let’s start with the people whose jobs your tax dollars support. Like @tedlieu

He wasn’t alone. You had to assume that a hoax - because, let’s be clear, thats what this was - connected to Native Americans had to involve @EWareen, right?

I’ve also left off the media outlets who’ve already settled their defamation cases (WaPo/CNN) and most of their main talent.

But the rest of the media dropped the ball, too. Here’s @ABC, who still havent corrected their claim Sandmann was mocking Native American protestors.

Here’s @nytimes, who similarly still haven’t corrected their accounting or taken down their tweets about students “jeering” Phillips.

You know why the families “swiftly circled” @nytimes? Because you and your industry lied about their kids.

@RollingStone getting an explosive story that advances their narrative wrong?! Why I never.

This from @TheCut / @NYMag just boggles the mind, given the additional reporting and information that’s come out in retrospect.

@voxdotcom doubled down after the situation was corrected (we’ll see more of that soon) and STILL see the issue as being a teenager’s “smirking silence” rather than his being defamed in the national media.

It is inconceivable that “if there’s anything to be gleaned” from a teenager being smeared for political purposes it’s that people just don’t agree, @NBCNews

And we had many, many voices on the left chime in. @kurteichenwald did his best to plaster the faces of these high school students everywhere as punishment for something they didn’t actually do. Just shameful.

I’m as surprised as you are to see @shaunking involved in a conspiracy theory about race.

Would you care to revisit the perspective that this will “backfire”, @Amy_Siskind? That take has, as they say, not aged well.

Resident not good person @soledadobrien chimed in.

Stormy Daniels? Stormy Daniels.

@funder just seems unhinged.

@DeanObeidallah is becoming a regular four-pic member on here, this time for demeaning kids as being racist embracers of white supremacy.

But @tariqnasheed outdoes Dean (and himself, really) with the Hitler Youth mention. And he even throws in a diss at Native Americans to boot.

Mesmerizing.

I spared most of the CNN family but couldn’t help but mention @keithboykin who called these kids “direct descendants of the white privilege that empowered white kids to mock Elizabeth Eckford at Little Rock Central High School in 1957.”

And there were those who just kept doubling down even after this story was debunked and the adults in the room apologized. Here’s @WajahatAli (just a sampling)

And ditto for @mehdirhasan who is also developing a solid track record as a multi-pic regular.

News stories happen quickly and we’re obviously a country on edge. Mistakes happen.

But there must - MUST - be accountability for a situation where high school kids were mocked and threatened (looking at you, @rezaaslan) for reasons that ended up proving false.

It’s shameful that, a year and a half later, that accountability hasn’t come and what little of it we’ve seen has been at the demand of a judge.

And yes, I know this doesn’t include everyone who smeared these kids and didn’t apologize. Which is, in and of itself, a sad thing

Also, I think the Covington Catholic situation is, in many ways, the media version of Graham’s Kavanaugh outrage.

I think it made clear to a lot of people (myself included) that, to many, someone’s good named dragged through the mud is a small price to pay for clicks.

It became a cultural moment that crystallized both how vicious and quick condemnation can be from the people who get to write the narrative, and how slow and forced any redress that follows (if any does) is likely to come.

So what should conservatives do?

Fight. Fight like hell. Congrats to @N1ckSandmann on this settlement. His courage and resilience are a testament to why conservatives shouldn’t bend the knee to the mob when they’ve done nothing wrong.