There has been a great deal of willfully malicious “reporting” this week on Covington Catholic High School and its students. Recall that a group of the school’s students became famous over the weekend after they were harassed on the National Mall by a few grown-ups who should have known better. Unfortunately for them, the national news media presented the incident as if they had been attacking someone, leading to a social media frenzy and threats of violence against these teenagers.
The worst offender for malicious reporting has been NBC News.
On Wednesday, the network’s social media team tweeted a headline that read, “A gay student who was barred by the Covington diocese from speaking at his 2018 graduation, is ‘not surprised’ by the Covington Catholic High School video.”
The story’s headline as it appears on the website reads, “Gay valedictorian banned from speaking at Covington graduation ‘not surprised’ by D.C. controversy,” and the subhead reads, “A gay student who was barred by the Covington diocese from speaking at his 2018 graduation, is ‘not surprised’ by the Covington Catholic High School video.”
Missing from these headlines: The fact that the valedictorian, Christian Bales, never attended Covington Catholic.
The report’s opening paragraph reads, “Video of white students from Covington Catholic High School confronting a Native American elder at the Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, D.C., last Friday went viral this past week. However, this is not the first time a school overseen by the Diocese of Covington in Kentucky has come under national media scrutiny.”
The report adds, “In May of last year, the Catholic diocese ruled just hours before Holy Cross High School’s graduation that the openly gay valedictorian and the student council president could not give their planned speeches at the Covington school’s official graduation ceremony.”
At last, the reason this story is irrelevant to the broader controversy that a combination of careless reporting and malicious social media sloganeering helped create.
Try to square this story’s opening lines with its headlines. It’s clear NBC dusted off an old incident and punched out a few intentionally misleading headlines in the hope that readers would assume Covington Catholic had done another bad thing. The reporter and his editors clearly hoped readers would assume its story was related somehow to the confrontation last weekend between Covington students and Nathan Phillips, a Native American protester.
That the NBC report even includes the following paragraphs is absurd:
Bales claims Covington Catholic is “notorious for being a not-well-disciplined school,” and he described the Diocese of Covington as “archaic.”
“They have the very last say in everything about students in the diocese,” Bales said, adding that the diocese has still not provided him and the student council president with “thorough explanations” of why their speeches were canceled last year.
It’s clear what is happening here with this NBC story.
Following the press’ disastrous promotion of the false story that the group of Covington students had actually harassed and taunted the Native American protester who confronted them, unprovoked, newsrooms have been scrounging desperately for dirt on the teens’ Kentucky high school. The reason is obvious. By proving Covington is somehow bad, and therefore so are its students, media organizations are trying to justify their initial rush to condemn the teens as vile racists.
[Read more: Rush to judgment? New details emerge on Native American elder’s standoff with MAGA-hat-wearing teens]
It’s as if to say: Even if it was false to claim that the teens mobbed a Native American, they’re still rotten kids because their school is rotten. We weren’t wrong, then, to portray them as monsters on the evening news!
So, in the service of promoting the narrative that the Kentucky high school is a bigot-mill, NBC sent a reporter to go searching for someone who’d confirm it. The network wanted so badly to prove this that it sought out the say-so of a 19-year-old college student who never even went to the school.
The NBC report was a conclusion — Covington Catholic is bad! — in search of supporting evidence. And they couldn’t even find that.
