I was holding off writing about this incident as I wanted to write a short but considered piece on the Covington Catholic School affair. Also other commentators, such as Sargon of Akkad, have done such a good job on commenting on this case that I wondered whether it would add anything or be worthwhile making any comment on the matter myself.

However, as a former employee of the Press in the UK I felt that I had to comment on the outcome of the media’s involvement in this affair. This is because I do have a dog in the press accuracy fight. I was trained by old school reporters who were fanatical fact checkers, people with integrity who would never let any story leave the office and into the public sphere unless they could be as near as possible be 100% sure that the facts were accurate. Of course there was nothing to stop newspaper sub editors and other staff bending the stories once they had received them from my agency, but the stuff that we handed over to the papers was as near as damn it completely accurate.

I have been shocked at the lack of fact checking regarding this story that has gone on in the American mainstream media. Too many journalists in the American press seem to have gone public with this story far too soon and without establishing the facts about what went on regarding the Covington Catholic affair. There was seemingly no attempt to check whether the short excerpts from a longer video matched with the narrative of the claimed ‘victim’ of the confrontation the Native American man Nathan Phillips.

The mainstream media both in the USA and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom has failed to properly an accurately report this incident and instead has engaged in comment and political activism posing as journalism. This is not a good position for the mainstream media to be in to be quite frank and will feed the lack of trust that is growing in mainstream media outlets. Whilst I am mature and realistic enough to accept that all publications will have their own editorial policy lines, what happened with some of the reporting of the Covington Affair crossed a whole load of moral and ethical lines. Activist journalists have unjustifiably whipped up a hate mob on social media aimed at young people from Covington High School and these activist journalists have allowed their own biases to trump the craft of reporting and more importantly reporting accurately.

We all, when we write, or report or comment on politics, culture or world events, can make mistakes. I’ve made some myself and have had to issue corrections on the occasional story where I commented without being in possession of all the facts. Journalists and writers and anybody out there who speaks in public are going to make the odd error, it’s obvious, we are all human and all subject to fallibility. However what happened in the American mass media regarding the Covington Affair in my view went far beyond a mere honest mistake. American journalists seemed to desperately want this story to be what they wanted it to be rather than what it was. Left leaning journalists so wanted this story to fit into their narrative of ‘white boys oppressing Native American man’ that they didn’t bother to check facts or dig into the background of Mr Phillips or the nature of the incident itself.

The result of the media’s biases and gross mishandling of this story is that the American mainstream media has been exposed as bent and untrustworthy. I have come to the conclusion that the big losers in this case are not the boys of Covington Catholic High School, who are currently lawyering up to tackle the dishonest media outlets, but the American mass news media themselves. They and their journalists have been shown to the world to be driven not by a desire to report news, but by a desire to promote a political agenda. The result of the Covington Affair is that there are now a whole lot more people, not just in the USA but across the world who are now less inclined to take on trust what is said by the reporters on outlets that were once both trusted and whose output was seen as ‘the first draft of history’.

It has been left to ordinary individuals, people without the backing of multi-million dollar corporations to dig out the truth of this story. People like the aforementioned Sargon of Akkad along with the independent journalist Tim Pool and the commentators Matt Christiansen and Longrider have provided far better reporting and comment on the Covington Affair than much of what I have seen coming from the US mainstream media. As someone who used to supply content to the mainstream media I see it as a sad state of affairs that individuals, motivate by a desire to get to the truth of an issue, can give us much more accurate, balanced and nuanced coverage of a story such as the Covington Affair than a bunch of supposedly well trained journalists. The US press has lost out big time over their handling of the Covington Affair and it will be a long time, if ever, before these outlets are trusted again. The mainstream media in the US can I believe, get over this loss of trust, but to do that they will need to employ those who are proper reporters rather than Leftist activists who merely pose as reporters.