As a guy with way too many passive interests and too little time, there’s a lot of things that might motivate me to generate a comment that don’t because because of that lack of time, and if I did, my hands might go on strike at all the typing. Into this category I can thrust the Covington Catholic students controversy. I ignored it because its initial presentation just sounded like a lot of other bigotry, and yet the details didn’t jive. For those unfamiliar with it, it’s a report of some Catholic high school students, visiting Washington, DC, for the March of Life, had a confrontation with a tribal elder who was in town for Indigenous Peoples March, and has a notorious picture of a group of the kids, some in red MAGA (Trump’s slogan, Make America Great Again) hats, staring or smirking, depending on who you read or how you interpret, at the elder.
Then there were reports that a group of people who call themselves Black Hebrew Israelites might have been involved, an interview with the elder that seemed a little odd, and a couple of days later, one of my favorite writers, Andrew Sullivan, has his own analysis of the incident. He reports on his viewing of the YouTube videos:
What I saw was extraordinary bigotry, threats of violence, hideous misogyny, disgusting racism, foul homophobia, and anti-Catholicism — not by the demonized schoolboys, but by grown men with a bullhorn, a small group of self-styled Black Hebrew Israelites. They’re a fringe sect — but an extremely aggressive one — known for inflammatory bigotry in public. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a hate group: “strongly anti-white and anti-Semitic.” They scream abuse at gays, women, white people, Jews, interracial couples, in the crudest of language. In their public display of bigotry, they’re at the same level as the Westboro Baptist sect: shockingly obscene. They were the instigators of the entire affair.
Which I had not noted in any previous reports, but then I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. But then this:
And yet the elite media seemed eager to downplay their role, referring to them only in passing, noting briefly that they were known to be anti-Semitic and anti-gay. After several days, the New York Times ran a news analysis on the group by John Eligon that reads like a press release from the sect: “They shout, use blunt and sometimes offensive language, and gamely engage in arguments aimed at drawing listeners near.” He notes that “they group people based on what they call nations, believing that there are 12 tribes among God’s chosen people. White people are not among those tribes, they believe, and will therefore be servants when Christ returns to Earth.” Nothing to see here, folks. Just a bunch of people preaching the enslavement of another race in public on speakers in the most inflammatory language imaginable.
Andrew then gives a number of their somewhat insulting, somewhat incomprehensible examples of racism and misogyny. No doubt my persistent agnosticism leaves me incapable of being properly outraged.
Christine Semba barely mentions the Black Hebrew Israelites in taking this opportunity to discuss the old Japanese movie Rashomon (1950), and how its engagement with the slippery concept of truth is mirrored in this incident.
Did Nathan Phillips, the 64-year-old Omaha elder, spark the confrontation by walking toward the Covington Catholic High School teens? Were those teens — especially 16-year old Nicholas Sandmann, who in videos is seen staring Phillips down, refusing to move — disrespectful, possibly even racist? Was this a case of the “liberal news media” rushing to destroy young people’s reputations, or of conservatives attempting to reframe reprehensible behavior into martyrdom?
“Rashomon on the Mall,” pundits have dubbed it: a far less exalted version, as befitting our far less exalted times. Yet Kurosawa’s film is celebrated for its investigation of deeper questions than most of our Twitter debates have touched on so far.
Erick Erickson of the far-right, Christian site The Resurgent has only pity:
I have tried to defend the American press. There are many great and fair reporters in this country at both the local and national level. I have vocally rejected the idea the press is the enemy of the people. But I increasingly understand why they are so hated by so many and why so many cheer on their bankruptcies and layoffs. And I am terribly sorry too many members of the media do not understand or do not care why people feel that way. I said this is an apology and not just a confession. It is.
I must apologize for the growing sense in me that it is no longer worth defending our press corps because I increasingly feel, as a Christian and conservative, the press is not interested in telling the truth and facts, but is heavily invested in ruining people like me. Intellectually, I know better. But it is hard not to get emotional when I see so many vile press-led attacks on people of faith and willful misreporting because someone has on a red cap or is a Christian or conservative. I do not see a will within the media as a whole to improve and increasingly the good and responsible journalists are getting overshadowed by the clickbait and ratings that cater to people who look and think like the reporters ruining the industry. It makes me sad.
Which is interesting, but given the misleading reporting of Fox News, which he doesn’t mention, makes him a little difficult to take seriously.
But if the mainstream press did screw up, condemning them to the trash heap of history in favor of the news sources which makes you happy and comfortable is an intellectual disaster. Do we drown children who make mistakes? Does the first mistake a cop make in training get him busted out? No. The press has been reporting its own error since then, and that’s part of the self-corrective mechanism any healthy institution must have.
But how about the left-wing punditry? Back to Andrew:
To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.
How did this grotesque inversion of the truth become the central narrative for what seemed to be the entire class of elite journalists on Twitter? That’s the somewhat terrifying question. Ruth Graham on Slate saw a 16-year-old she’d seen on a tape for a couple of minutes and immediately knew that he was indistinguishable from the “white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s” or other white “high school boys flashing Nazi salutes.” Even after the full context was clear, Graham refused to apologize to the kid, or retract her condemnation: The context didn’t “change the larger story” which, she explained, was bigotry toward Native Americans. She cited Trump’s use of the name “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren as evidence. But using a bullhorn to call Native Americans “savages” and “drunkards at the casino” to their faces a few minutes earlier on the same tape was not worth a mention? …
Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. “I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. “And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.” This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.
There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one.
When a conservative writer who’s long condemned Fox News and backed the mainstream media now expresses doubt about them as well, it’s time for the folks responsible for that media, the editors first and the opinion writers second, to sit up, listen, and consider what intellectual failures are leading to publishing what appears to be trash. This is part of the mechanism of self-correction: fix yourself or die. And that’s why I don’t take the Semba piece all that seriously, because it appears to be trying to clothe inadequate investigation in the mysterious essence of subjective truth.
And while that mysterious essence of truth in Rashomon appears to have to do with the problem of second-hand reporting, we happen to have first-hand witnessing in this case via unfiltered videos, as I understand it, rendering the entire Rashomon parallel, well, illegitimate.
Me? I’m glad I’m not a journalist. I do enough of the inadequate investigation thing as a software engineer. But Andrew’s piece is worth a thorough read. A rush to judgment is never a pretty thing.
