Monday, January 21, 2019

Late Monday commentary on the Lincoln Memorial Dust-up

Trump’s freewheeling past should not lend automatic credibility to the latest media charge against him (which, a nanosecond after hitting the media, was followed by demands for his impeachment). So, too, that a co-author of the BuzzFeed piece, Jason Leopold, had been a confessed felon, had been fired or repudiated by various news venues for alleged unprofessional conduct, and had been an admitted prevaricator did not ipso facto mean that his latest “scoop” had to be immediately written off as false. Just a few hours of gestation would make that clear enough.

Victor Davis Hanson:  From the BuzzFeed Psychodrama to the Covington Video Melodrama  "In the current polarized climate concerning the shutdown, Trump, the media, etc., it would be wise for everyone to take a deep breath and wait at least 24 hours before snap editorializing, in response to the latest sensational morality tale flashing across electronic media.
"In the present climate, one video (or even three or four videos from different angles and elevations) is not necessarily worth a thousand words.
"I doubt we will know exactly what happened at the Washington, D.C., march until more eye-witnesses, videos, interviews, etc. are all collated (other than the fact that different groups were shouting different things, sometimes at each other). But the result will probably be a lot more complicated than the initial narrative of “white spoiled MAGA Catholic youth approached, surrounded, and taunted noble Native American elder,” a narrative that has induced an epidemic of virtue-signaling." . . .
Don Surber considers Covington kids should sue Twitter  . . . "Meanwhile, in news of fools who rush in, Media-ite reported, "Journalists and Celebs Rush to Delete Tweets Slamming MAGA-Hat Kids."
" If it looks too good to be true, it is."


Throwing Covington’s Pro-Life Boys to the Crocodiles  . . . "Here’s CNN’s carefully edited footage and one-sided commentary.
. . . Instead, we saw an instant feeding frenzy. One aimed at destroying young men’s lives, based only on … carefully edited footage from screamingly biased media. And our religious leaders, and even some typically canny political commentators, showed an unseemly eagerness to join in.

Apologies Roll In For Catholic School Kids After As Fuller Picture Emerges 
. . . "[National Review] pulled the article on Sunday and published an explanation by editor Rich Lowry.
“Anyway, if not a hoax, this at the very least was not what it initially seemed,” Lowry wrote. “I deleted my original tweet and we also took down a strongly worded post by my colleague Nick Frankovich that relied on the incomplete video. It’s another reminder — even for an old hand like me — that it’s best not to make snap judgments and to wait for all sides of a controversy to have a chance to be heard.” . . .


 
. . . "But then I watched more clips, showing the greater context of the incident. It is not as simple as it has been portrayed. Below is a more complete video account of what happened. In it, one of the Catholic boys is overheard asking, “Does anybody know what he’s doing? Does anybody know what’s going on here.”
"And, in it, one of the Indians with Phillips shouts: “White people, go back to Europe. This is not your land.” He curses the students with f-bombs (video is NSFW). He goes on: “You’re being a white man about it. That’s all you know how to do.”
"You didn’t see that in the news reporting, did you?

"The majority of the apologies and retractions have come from sources that most would consider right-leaning."

Nathan Phillips’ Story Of What Happened Changed From Media Outlet To Media Outlet

Journalists and Celebs Rush to Delete Tweets Slamming MAGA-Hat Kids

Blue-Check Twitter Mob Demands The Doxxing And Violence Against High School Junior  Kyle Kashuv :  
The Media has bent over backwards to defend my Parkland High school liberal peers, no matter what outrageous things they have said.
But now they have tried to ruin a high school kid's life, over fake news.
What changed?
The student was a Trump Supporter.


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