The Covington Kids Controversy: One Year Later
A study of the media’s conduct during the Lincoln Memorial controversy
It’s been one year since U.S. media was ripped apart by the Lincoln Memorial controversy—when fragments of a confrontation between Native American protesters, MAGA hat-wearing teens from Covington Catholic High School, and racially confrontational street preachers first went viral in January 2019.
The media coverage that ensued revealed a host of chaotic problems — around race, polarization, mob justice, and the nature of the media itself. The coverage thoroughly dissected—or should I say vivisected?—what exactly happened during the confrontation, and what it all meant.
Less well understood, though, was the second layer of controversy: the controversy over the media coverage itself. That’s because this meta-coverage, the coverage of the media’s coverage of the confrontation, quickly and predictably degenerated into unreliable partisanship.
But looking into how well the media performed its duty—to convey what happened and analyze what it means—is just as important as the event itself. The following narrative account focuses on just this facet of the controversy, and reveals the complexity that characterizes media in the 21st century. It looks beyond the event, into the media event spanning from January 18, 2019 to January 23, 2019.
The Event
On the 18th of January, 2019, at around 4:00 p.m., two demonstrations were present at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Student attendees of the March for Life demonstration against abortion from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky, had been asked to wait for their transport at the monument. Meanwhile, the Indigenous People’s March was holding its closing ceremony at the same monument.
This ceremony was mildly disrupted by the preaching of a third group — five members of a religious sect known as Hebrew Israelites, who maintain that African Americans are descendants of the Israelites from biblical times. The particular group that was there, known as House of Israel, believe not just African Americans but Native Americans and other ethnicities also descend from the 12 tribes of Israel. The Washington chapter of these Hebrew Israelites were at the Lincoln Memorial expressly to preach to the Native Americans. Their engagement involved confrontational messages attacking supposed false beliefs they attribute to the natives—for example, that they worship totems like “savages.” A few protestors argued with the Hebrew Israelites over their conduct and message.
As the final Native American ceremony ended, the Hebrew Israelite preaching attracted more attention, and the preachers engaged with certain parts of the crowd. They began to focus on the Covington Catholic teenagers. These attacks included racial insults and suggestions that they were on their way to becoming “school shooters.” Over time, the number of students assembled at the Memorial increased to around 100, and their group increasingly bunched together.
After more general preaching to the surrounding public, focusing on political and racial injustice and asserting a mutual “perpetual hatred” between white people and other ethnicities, the Hebrew Israelites turned their attention back to the Covington Catholic boys, calling them incest babies and challenging them to point to a time when America was great (many of the students were wearing Make America Great Again hats).
In response, the students started “school spirit” sports chants. Three were “directed towards” the Hebrew Israelites, and a fourth was conducted with the students in a circle with their backs to the preachers.
As the fourth chant finished, a group of eight Native American protesters, remnants of their fuller demonstration from earlier, approached the group of students. One of their leaders, Nathan Phillips, was drumming and chanting. They reached them at the culmination of the students’ own chant. The students jumped and turned, and they were met by the drummer. They continued to jump to his drumming, even as he moved into the center of the group. The teenagers reacted to this in an ambiguous way — some seemed confused, some joined in and jumped to the drums, some seemed to mock him. Nathan Phillips eventually positioned himself in front of one student in particular, a student with an ambiguous expression on his face. Some of the activists and students verbally argued. The attention of the students shifted back to the Hebrew Israelites, while Nathan Phillips tried to regain their attention. After another argument between the Hebrew Israelites and the students, transport arrived and the students left.
These events were filmed by many different people, with the first footage going up almost immediately. A one-minute video clip that starts when Phillips was already within the student group and focuses on him and the student standing in front of him was uploaded to Instagram by an activist who had participated in the Indigenous People’s March that same day. She framed it with the text, “The amount of disrespect…. TO THIS DAY,” and used hashtags to link it to various causes.
The Media Event
The media event that took place in the days following the confrontation can be more easily understood by grouping U.S. media entities into identifiable blocks.
The first is the Mainstream Media, including ABC, CBS, NBC (as the network venues); CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC (as the cable news venues); and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others (as the print and digital news outlets).
A second is Right-Wing Media, including, among mainstream sources, Fox News, but also a huge constellation of digital outlets like Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Breitbart, and more.
A third is Left-Wing Media, including, among mainstream sources, MSNBC, but also a large number of digital outlets such as BuzzFeed, Mother Jones, The Nation, Slate, and so on.
This case also developed significantly on social media, specifically Twitter. Since the activity of some Twitter users, whether affiliated with media corporations or not, significantly shaped the way we understood the events at the Lincoln Memorial, they constitute the fourth media block.
Twitter was the place where the aforementioned minute-long video clip achieved virality. The Twitter account @2020fight (which was apparently deleted later in the week) posted the clip on the 18th with the text “This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous Peoples March.” The tweet spread rapidly, and by the morning of the 19th had become viral. Prominent users quoted the tweet with their own added take, and an initial wave of these quote-tweets largely kept the frame that the video showed students harassing an elder. Many of these quote-tweets themselves went viral. Here is an example:
As the morning went on, the idea that the students merely “bothered” a protester gave way to the idea that the video showed an explicitly racist occurrence or hate incident.
This frame was pushed by a number of high-profile social media figures, as well as professional journalists and politicians. Here is an example:
Christopher Mathias of HuffPost equated the incident with racist abuse during the 1963 Woolworth’s Lunch Counter civil rights protest, while the newly elected Congresswoman Deb Haaland commented: “The students’ display of blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking.”
This acceleration in how the episode was framed was helped by apparent eyewitness accounts shared on social media. Twitter user @sahluwal’s viral thread was updated later in the morning by a testimony that included:
At the close of the Indigenous People’s March and rally, the few of us left lingering to chat and meet were confronted and surrounded by 50–70 young people wearing Trump’s [sic] hats, T-shirt’s and other apparel… The group outnumbered us and enclosed our small group, chanting “build the wall” and other trumpisms
This account directly states what had already been assumed by many viewers of the video: that the students surrounded the protesters in a hostile manner. The assertion that the students were chanting “Build the Wall!” also featured in early video testimony from Nathan Phillips. Neither of these assertions were supported by later—and fuller—video footage.
Another dynamic was visible on Twitter in the early part of Saturday, January 19. There was tremendous early hostility to the counter-suggestion, slowly beginning to emerge, that the Covington boys were not in fact hostile racists demeaning an old indigenous man. The interpretation of racism was aggressively enforced against even mild attempts to see the confrontation as something far less sinister. When the freelance journalist Michael Tracey made one of these rare attempts, he received serious pushback.
In this example we see pushback from The Nation’s Jeet Heer (who was at The New Republic at the time). A number of different threads and tweets replicated this criticism, accusing Tracey of failing to recognize this episode as one of blinding hatred on the part of white kids toward members of other races. These threads and replies—a mere sampling of the overall enforcement of this new racism frame—suggest that a narrative had been formed and anyone offering an alternative interpretation would receive strong pushback for doing so.
At this point, major U.S. news outlets began to cover the story. Although holding back from the more extreme rhetoric, they largely followed the narrative that had been established in the early phase of this event, and confidently condemned the students. Material for these stories was gathered by journalists from many different sources — statements from the school’s leadership and from politicians, a press release from the organizers of the Indigenous People’s March, as well as interviews with Nathan Phillips and other activists.
Much of the framing was driven by these sources, though news outlets proved curiously selective with this content. Phillips and a second activist mentioned a perceived conflict between the students and a third group (the Hebrew Israelites). This conflict was not presented by any major outlet apart from CNN, who nevertheless adopted it into their larger frame of the-Covington-students-as-aggressors. This is from their broadcast that night: “Nathan Phillips has told CNN that these kids originally started shouting at a group of African-Americans, and he walked between them trying to break up the shouting match that followed.”
The idea that the students actively surrounded the Native American activists was reinforced by other major stories. The original New York Times headline was “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native Elder at Indigenous Peoples March,” while The Washington Post reported that “in an interview Saturday, Phillips, 64, said he felt threatened by the teens and that they suddenly swarmed around him.”
Remarkably, nearly all articles and broadcasts from mainstream sources managed to get only one side of the story. And this despite the video evidence available at the time suggesting more footage may be forthcoming—that is, it was obvious from the beginning these video clips represented incomplete footage and that the confrontation was much broader than the little we were able to see initially. Yet the preferred framing was already set.
The quotations that were used were generally presented with little context and qualification. The Times, the Post, CNN, and NBC all added Donald Trump into their coverage — the confrontation supposedly being representative of Trump’s America, or caused by Trump’s rhetoric.
While Fox News and Breitbart withheld coverage initially, other conservative media publications followed the condemnation, such as National Review, which framed the boys’ actions as incompatible with Christian teaching.
As this rush to impugn guilt to the boys was taking place, still on the first day of the controversy, a counter-narrative began to spread. At 12:48 p.m., a pupil of an all-girls Catholic school neighboring Covington posted a very short clip to Twitter which showed that Nathan Phillips had approached the students, not the other way around. This clip saw some in conservative media start to question the received version of events.
Joey Saladino, a Trump-supporting YouTube and Twitter personality, acquired additional footage early in the afternoon which illustrated some of the abuse the students had received from the Hebrew Israelites. At the same time, Saladino was in conversation with a number of Covington students who were frantically trying to break through the noise to tell their own version of events. This evidence appeared to go nowhere, likely due to Saladino’s lack of credibility as a journalist.
By 7:00 p.m., a nine-minute clip was circulated, showing a racial argument between Native American protesters and the students — which arguably reflected badly on the protesters — and homophobic abuse from the Hebrew Israelites toward the students. This video in particular convinced a number of independent media figures that the entire incident had been egregiously misdescribed, and that a major miscarriage of “public justice” was taking place against the Covington boys. Two people in particular took a central role in the burgeoning re-interpretation of events: Tim Pool, an independent YouTube and social media-based journalist, and Twitter user @PetiteNicoco, a podcaster and former journalism student.
After being convinced that something was quite off with the original narrative, @PetiteNicoco began trawling Facebook and other media for additional evidence. She discovered that one of the Hebrew Israelites had uploaded a very long video of the entire event to his Facebook account: “Warriorofthe12shields.” She downloaded this video, which turned out to be key, since it was deleted by the original poster within hours. She told Pool about the video, and this extensive piece of evidence began to be dissected by them and a small network of other users, one of whom uploaded it to YouTube. Soon Pool was able to say the following with confidence:
Here Pool, an independent journalist, is fact-checking and countering elements from the stories of major publications.
This vital—and, for the Covington boys, exonerating—information spread gradually. Many journalists were still unaware of it the next morning — but higher-profile active Twitter users were making sure people would get to see just how misguided the original narrative had been. Illustrating the tug of war dynamic between narrative and counter-narrative in our new social media news age, Tracey quickly came under considerable pressure to reverse the condemnation he had been pressured into the previous day.
The 20th
Another journalist who was quickly convinced by the new evidence was Katie Herzog, a writer for the Seattle-based The Stranger. Herzog was initially so outraged by the first viral video that she felt the student at the heart of the confrontation “needed to get punched.” After reviewing evidence tweeted by Pool, she spent most of the morning attempting to convince other users, including Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, that the story had come out incorrectly.
In contrast to these individuals, the big media corporations had difficulty adapting to the story. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all made minor edits to their stories (i.e., a changed headline or an inserted paragraph), while allowing the general tone of condemnation to remain.
CNN’s broadcast division bucked this trend. It successfully pivoted on the story, led by Washington correspondent Jake Tapper. Tapper had not tweeted about the controversy on the 19th. At 4:31 p.m. on the 20th, he tweeted a link to a story by Robby Soave that had just been published on the libertarian site Reason. Soave’s article cohesively used the long video to reform the narrative of the events, and re-framed individual incidents in ways which suggested the students were not at fault. Soave accused the “major” outlets, as well as social media by and large, of getting the story completely wrong. He concluded:
The boys are undoubtedly owed an apology from the numerous people who joined this social media pile-on. This is shaping up to be one of the biggest major media misfires in quite some time.
Soave’s article, propelled by Tapper’s implicit endorsement, was held by Washington Post writers Isaac Stanley-Becker and Kristine Phillips to be a key piece in helping shape the emerging “rival narrative.” Tapper followed this tweet at 6:59 p.m. with a statement by the “smirking” or “smiling” student at the center of the viral video and the controversy. The statement, written with the help of PR firm RunSwitch, thoroughly described the event and emphatically denied any wrongdoing. It also corresponded closely to the fuller videos that were being discovered.
Tapper ended his intervention in the controversy with a link to a CNN video segment that would be aired several times that evening. The story had been given to correspondent and award-winning journalist Sara Sidner, who presented a “balanced” account of competing sides or voices. She also shifted the condemnation onto the Hebrew Israelites. With this, CNN had taken on the challenge of openly pivoting away from their earlier framing of the controversy.
However, an already complex and messy situation was still awaiting engagement from right-wing media. As the above three outlets openly or quietly pivoted, with various degrees of cohesion, Breitbart began to publish on the subject extensively. In five separate articles on the 20th they asserted the blamelessness of the students, employing features of the videos as proof, while using the occasion to fiercely attack mainstream media and individual media figures. This attack was heavily politicized and polarized — the opponents of Breitbart’s position were often tied together as “the left,” which included the above mainstream outlets. For Breitbart writer James Delingpole, the “whole story just exposes the left for the lying, cry-bullying, vindictive, shrill, ugly hate machine it is.”
As the 21st dawned, social media was on fire with passionate argument about the issue. Right-wing media was only just beginning their offensive, using the coverage of the event to counter-attack mainstream media itself — while Fox News, America’s most-watched news network, still had not meaningfully waded in on the issue.
The mainstream outlets that had already covered the confrontation were in an incredibly difficult position. If they reversed their framing, would it not be tantamount to admitting that the attacks accusing them of incompetence or anti-conservative bias were correct?
The 21st
The reaction to this situation was quite similar across all the major media outlets, apart from Fox News. On the 21st, these outlets released a series of stories which were framed as a balanced account of events, in the sense that they presented “equal” competing testimonies from different parties. However, there were a number of key traits that qualified these stories.
Firstly, many of them favored frames — or positioned framing testimonies from sources — which retained a subtle condemnation of the students. For instance, in the closing hours of January 20, The New York Times’ Sarah Mervosh and Emily S. Rueb integrated testimony from the three distinct parties of the confrontation, but they end their article with the testimony of the Native American activists. This testimony remained condemnatory of the students.
Alternatively, media segments which changed the narrative, like Sara Sidner’s, could be sandwiched by studio commentary which framed the event in terms which were still casually condemnatory of the students. For instance here is a CNN morning broadcast transcript:
BRIGGS: “That Kentucky teen, who went face-to-face with a Native American man at a march near the Lincoln Memorial Friday, now says he was trying to diffuse [sic] the situation. Judge for yourself, these students may now face expulsion. The Diocese of Covington, Kentucky, released a statement condemning the high school students.”
JARRETT: “The diocese says this behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person, but the student…claims a look at all of the video tells a different story. CNN’s Sara Sidner has more for us on this.”
In contrast to these trends, opinion articles began to appear in the Times, and in other places, which were extremely critical of the haste with which the media had reported on the story. These views, a minority by the numbers, combined despair at this conduct with meta-analysis of the way the media functions.
Other media figures refused to change their critical view of the students. Some, such as Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffery, simply could not see anything exculpatory in the new video evidence.
This despite Jeffery’s deliberation with Katie Herzog the following morning.
In sum, the reaction of left and mainstream media had become manifestly confused and incongruous. In the evening the behemoth, Fox News, in the fullness of its unified, anti-elitist rhetoric, highlighted this disintegration with its first transmission on the controversy.
Sustained broadcasts on the topic all evening long mixed an impressive array of footage, rhetoric, and debate. Fox’s reticence before this point allowed them to conduct a damning exegesis of preceding media coverage. Their frames on the hypocrisy of the media were reinforced by being able to show potentially shocking clips of racist and homophobic abuse directed at the students, rarely encountered in media outside Twitter and YouTube. Their anti-elitism, echoing Trump’s successful political strategy, was accompanied by rhetoric against “the left” similar in extremity to Breitbart’s (the focus of Tucker Carlson’s broadcast). Some analysis of the events was present, but was for the most part drowned out by rhetoric.
On the evening of the 21st, while Fox’s aggressive coverage was being aired, another new actor intervened in the controversy, again via Twitter. At 9:46 p.m., President Donald Trump tweeted on the matter, quoting Fox News’ Carlson and asserting that the students had been smeared by the media. At 7:32 the next morning he tweeted again:
If the aggressive coverage of Fox News on the 21st might have affected the framing strategies of the rest of the mainstream media on the 22nd, Trump’s intervention had made this more certain.
The 22nd and 23rd
As the throes of the Lincoln Memorial controversy moved toward their end, the mainstream media reacted—almost helplessly, it seemed—against the confident rhetoric of their right-wing counterparts. These days saw a clear trend towards a re-condemnation of the students — a following of the double-down line taken by many left-ideological figures in the preceding days. This double-down was often hidden within stories with an apparently different purpose. One example is Eli Rosenberg in the Post on the 23rd; the focus of the story is the possibility that the media event was artificially generated by an unknown party:
Lavoie, the New York political strategist…said he has complicated feelings about the whole affair. On one hand, the behavior shown in the videos was a striking demonstration of racism, white supremacy and entitlement. … But, he said, it’s important to know whether the videos…were exploiting the explosive issue of race for the purposes of propaganda.
According to this, the initial viral framing of the students as racist and its recapitulation by the above outlets is justified, but is relegated to a passing comment. Other stories appeared to offer balance, but underlined a particular interpretation — e.g., Monica Hesse for the Post:
Maybe you think Sandmann didn’t do anything and is a victim of an internet mob.
Or maybe you think that standing there was its own act of aggression. The appearance of doing nothing while actually doing something.
Alarm at what had occurred, as well as insightful self-critique, also continued to be published — however, with the exception of the Times, the weight of coverage fell strongly on the side of re-condemnation.
Fox News and Breitbart used this trend of double down condemnation as fuel to extend its outraged coverage directed at mainstream and left media. Specific examples were used to bolster the broad frame of media bias, malpractice, and elitism, while the self-critical elements of the rest of the mainstream were largely ignored.
Although the event would continue to be written about and discussed for weeks, the patterns had been set by the 23rd, and intensity of interest had begun to wane. The event had generated intense polarization between citizens and media, a polarization at times feeding a sense of disgust and disbelief that the “other side” could sincerely hold its position.
That the event was considered to have potentially harmed the social fabric of the U.S. itself is illustrated by a swift investigation of the account @2020fight by the House Intelligence Committee on the 25th. A spokesman for Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said, “lawmakers had focused on the video and who might be behind it as part of their efforts to combat foreign interference in political campaigns.” No evidence has been found in that direction, although evidence was seen that the account offered to post content for pay.
Whether this account was a “rogue actor” or not, I have illustrated how various parts of the media amplified and sustained the controversy over the course of many days, beyond the initial tweet from @2020fight.
On February 11 an independent investigation contracted by the Covington Diocese largely exonerated the students.
