Following the disclosure of the new evidence on Jan. 20 of last year, journalists and politicians rushed to delete tweets that cast the high school students as the face of American racism. And earlier this month, Nick Sandmann, the student whose alleged “smirk” was seen in a widely publicized photo of the incident, settled a defamation lawsuit against CNN. Sandmann’s lawyer says more lawsuits are on the way.
But as Soave reports this week in Reason, there are some journalists who refused to acknowledge how badly the story had been botched. This included Ruth Graham of Slate and Laura Wagner (then of Deadspin, now with Vice). The latter claimed that morally re-evaluating the events in light of new evidence should be avoided, since it would confer “undeserved sympathy to the privileged.” Other media, including the New York Daily News and NBC News, dug up non-sequitur claims about Covington as an apparent means to prop up the original suggestion that the school was a den of bigotry.
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