On January 18, a video went viral of a high schooler wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat smirking at an older Native American man while he chanted and hit a drum.
The initial media coverage of the stand-off between 16-year-old Nick Sandmann and Nathan Phillips was inadequate to say the least, so I’m going to take you through what really happened and what to take away from this incident.
When the story first broke, social media and liberal media sources like CNN and ABC News were quick to judge the situation before actually figuring out what was going on. Which is ironic, considering that liberals pride themselves on being accepting and open minded — unless maybe your views are different than theirs?
The liberal media saw a white teenager who attends a Catholic School, wearing a MAGA hat, smirking at an older Native American man. There was no need to do any more research: he was wearing the hat; he’s a bigot; he was harassing Phillips.
News sources that jumped to conclusions have since covered their tracks after doing more research into what actually happened, which can be seen in the editor’s note in CNN’s article “Teen in confrontation with Native American elder says he was trying to defuse the situation.” The editor’s note states, “This article and headline have been updated several times since its first publication to add additional reporting regarding witness accounts, statements and other details.”
So what did actually happen?
Students from Covington Catholic High School (Kentucky) were in Washington DC for the annual March for Life and were waiting for their bus at the Lincoln Memorial. A group of Native Americans had just participated in the inaugural Indigenous Peoples March, and the Black Hebrew Israelites were in the area to stir the pot and preach their beliefs.
The Black Hebrew Israelites, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, are a black-supremacist group that claim to be the true descendants of the ancient Israelites. Before the incident between Sandmann and Phillips occurred, the Black Hebrew Israelites had been harassing the students for an hour, calling them various unprintable slurs. Other footage shows members of the group saying hateful things to the Native Americans present.
In an effort to drown out the hate speech coming from the Black Hebrew Israelites, the students began doing school spirit chants, which is a better alternative than absorbing the hate speech until someone retaliates either physically or verbally. But, performing school chants made the students frenetic, and ultimately escalated the situation.
It is very concerning that when news reports were first released about the Phillips-Sandmann stand-off, there was no mention about how the Black Hebrew Israelites instigated the confrontation. Without the Black Hebrew Israelites, there likely would have been no issues, but because it was so easy to play upon the stereotypes of Trump supporters, the liberal ‘journalists’ did not bother to investigate the scenario.
Phillips, an Omaha Native American political activist, and a leader of the Indigenous Peoples’ March, explained to The Washington Post that he noticed the situation between the Black Hebrew Israelites and the Covington students had started to escalate, so he decided to calm the situation.
Phillips began to walk toward the crowd of Covington students, chanting a traditional Native American intertribal pow-wow song while hitting an animal skin drum. I do not know why Phillips thought his actions would diffuse the situation. Chanting while hitting a drum was never going to bring more calm to the situation. Phillips may have been reciting a Native American prayer, but how were the Covington students supposed to know this?
According to a Washington Post article, Phillips claimed, “[The Covington students] swarmed around him as he and other activists were wrapping up the march and preparing to leave.” This statement is evidently false when you watch a video of Phillips walk into the crowd of students. Phillips also stated that he wanted to get to the Lincoln Memorial to finish his song and exit the situation, but, instead of going straight to the monument, he walked into the crowd and then tried to get to the monument through the crowd.
Phillips’ questionable methods for creating peace and his inaccurate claims of his involvement in the situation makes me wonder if creating peace was his sole goal for walking into the middle of the crowd of Covington students. But, once again the liberal media failed to report all sides of the story, this time leaving out how Phillips was not completely innocent in the face-off.
On his way to the Lincoln Memorial, through the crowd of students, 16-year-old Nick Sandmann stood in Phillips’ way not letting him pass, so, Phillips and Sandmann had a standoff near the stairs of Lincoln Memorial. Philipps stood there playing the drum and chanting, while Sandmann stared at him, silent, smirking. Sandmann should have just let the man pass. I know he was excited from the chants and the situation was very chaotic, but it is disrespectful to stand in the way of someone (especially an elder) and smirk at them. What he did was disrespectful not only to Phillips, but also to Phillips’s culture, and he should apologize. Some of Sandmann’s classmates seemed to be disrespectful by doing the tomahawk chop and mocking Phillips, which is also unacceptable.
So why did Sandmann have to block Phillips’ way, and why did Phillips have to insert himself into the situation? Who knows, maybe they’re just dramatic people looking for attention.There are a lot of reasons why the incident never should have happened, and when you do root-cause analysis and ask “why” five times, you figure out that it all started with marches. I sometimes question the purpose and effectiveness of marches, but that story can be written another time…
Why use the term “liberal media,” when really it’s just all media. Social media or mass-media. None took the time to get facts surrounding the occurrence before beginning to “report” on it. You also left out the part of the story where some of Sandmann’s classmates were harassing females earlier in the day, (https://www.dailydot.com/irl/covington-boys-video/) and the part where his parents hired a PR firm to pen and release his statement regarding the incident a few days after it happened.
I understand your aim was to bring light to the full truth of this story and to criticize the media’s inaccurate portrayal, but I have some problems with how you went about doing it. The issue is not with the political bias of the reporting news outlets, but with the state of digital journalism in general. News outlets are pressured to prioritize speed over accuracy in order to be the first to break stories in our digital age. The failure of many outlets to acknowledge the involvement of the Black Hebrew Israelites is glaring, but it is not an issue with liberalism or liberal media. I also find an issue with this piece being labelled as opinion. I’m struggling to find a central argument to your points, and you do not provide “what to take away from it” as the title suggests. If this had been written as a hard news story it would have been very good; instead, it feels like you labelled it an opinion piece as an excuse to insert your opinions in unnecessary places. Referring to the parties involved as “dramatic and looking for attention” does nothing to further the story, neither does continually blaming liberalism. Regardless, your writing style is good and you were right to want to address the mishandling of this situation in the media. Keep writing; I look forward to reading your future work.