By Mairead McArdle
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School
student who sued major news outlets in the aftermath of their coverage of a
controversial interaction he and several of his classmates had with a Native
American activist, said Tuesday that the “full war machine of the mainstream
media” was unleashed against him and called for a return to “responsible”
reporting.
Sandmann sued the Washington Post, CNN, the New
York Times, and other major outlets for defamation after their coverage
portrayed him and his classmates as racist aggressors who cornered Nathan
Phillips, an elderly Native American man, during a confrontation near the
Lincoln Memorial on January 18 of last year.
“My life changed forever in that one moment” Sandmann said
during his address to the Republican National Convention. “The full war machine
of the mainstream media revved up into attack mode” without researching the
full video footage of the incident, investigating Phillips’s motives, or ever
asking him for his side of the story.
“And do you know why? Because the truth was not
important,” he added.
Viral video of the incident showed Sandmann, who was 16
at the time, and Phillips standing face to face as Phillips loudly beat on a
drum inches away from the Kentucky high schooler’s face while Sandmann smirked.
NBC asserted that Sandmann “blocked” Phillips and “did
not allow him to retreat” during their interaction. But longer versions of the
video, released after the media outlets had already reported that Sandmann
initiated the confrontation, showed that Phillips approached Sandmann, who
stood mostly still during the incident. Before the encounter between Sandmann
and Phillips, members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a militant black
nationalist group, began a confrontation with the teenagers, taunting and
shouting slurs at them.
Sandmann and his classmates, who were attending the
annual anti-abortion March for Life, wore “Make America Great Again” caps,
another fact initial media reports emphasized.
Phillips and other “professional protesters” were looking
to turn him into the “latest poster child showing why Trump is bad,” Sandmann
said Tuesday.
“Looking back now, how could I have possibly imagined
that the simple act of putting on that red hat would unleash hate from the left
and make myself the target of network and cable news networks nationwide,”
Sandmann said.
Sandmann recently reached legal settlements with CNN and
the Washington Post for an undisclosed sum.
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