Student’s family swings back at media

Park Hills is an active community located in the tranquil rolling hills of northern Kentucky.

“Residents and business owners take pride in great civic features: Green spaces, historic homes, and local events,” its website states.

Covington Catholic High School, whose motto is “building minds, living faith,” is an integral part of that close-knit community.

“We foster an environment of educational excellence and equip young men with a set of spiritual and moral values to become strong Christian leaders and models of our Catholic faith,” the school’s mission statement proclaims. “We encourage respect for others and service to the community.”

In a few weeks, Covington seniors will graduate, taking the spiritual and moral values they learned at the school outside its walls. Last January, however, a number of the Covington students experienced some of the pitfalls of the outside world. Through no fault of their own, they were thrust into the national spotlight by a biased media while visiting the Washington, D.C., for a pro-life march.

A shortened news video of students interacting with others outside the Lincoln Memorial went viral, and some large liberal media outlets, without fact-checking, determined that the students were racists and instigating a conflict. A determining factor for the negative hype may have been the Donald Trump-inspired “Make America Great Again” baseball caps some of the students were wearing.

Students said that they sought chaperones’ permission to perform school chants to drown out the noise from a group of black “Hebrew Israelites” who were yelling racial epithets and other vulgarities at them.

One student in particular — Nicholas Sandmann — became a media target. The video shows him smiling while Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist, beats a drum and chants while standing in front of Sandmann. Some in the media somehow interpreted this as Sandmann taunting and harassing the Native American elder.

NBC’s Savannah Guthrie helped paint Sandmann as an instigator. Guthrie ignored Sandmann’s explanation that he received death threats and was simply exercising his first amendment right to freedom of assembly. Instead she fired leading questions, including: “Do you feel from this experience that you owe anybody an apology?” and “Do you see your own fault, in any way?”

Sandmann answered that he was not disrespectful to Philips — that he respected him and would like to talk to him. He said he wished the whole thing could have been avoided but that he wasn’t sorry for standing there and listening to Phillips.

The Sandmann family has fired back through legal channels, claiming Nicholas was smeared by the media, leading to verbal abuse, including threats and cyberbullying. On Feb. 20, the family sued The Washington Post for $250 million, which is the amount of money Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos paid for the newspaper in 2013.

“The members of the mob who falsely attacked or threatened Nick Sandmann should be on notice that his attorneys will identify them and will take aggressive legal action against them to achieve full accountability for their wrongdoing and willful mistreatment of this young man,” stated attorney L. Lin Wood.

Last week, attorneys announced that NBCUniversal and MSNBC are also being sued for $275 million.

“The journey for justice for Nicholas Sandmann & for media accountability continues,” Wood tweeted. “False accusers should not rest easy.”

Robert Barnes, another attorney who has offered to represent the Covington students pro bono, tweeted a stark warning to the liberal outlets who portrayed some students as racists: “This is libel. Retract, or get sued.”

History shows that routinely suing media companies for libel is not a good thing. The liberal media needs to be held accountable, however, when they defame innocent teenagers and target them as objects of hatred through their biased, inept reporting.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com