The Washington Post, recently hit with a $250 million lawsuit for its coverage of a Kentucky high school student’s January confrontation with a veteran at the Lincoln Memorial, on Friday issued an editor’s note admitting that subsequent information either contradicted or failed to confirm accounts relayed in its initial article.<br /><br />“A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial,” the note began. “Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict.<br /><br />“The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos,” the note went on to say.<br /><br />The Post also admitted to deleting a Jan. 19 tweet "in light of later developments."<br /><br />But if the goal was to smooth over concerns about how the encounter had been covered, it fell short for at least one person attorney representing Sandmann.<br /><br />“Too little, too late,” L. Lin Wood, an attorney representing student Nicholas Sandmann, said in a terse reply.<br /><br />The lawsuit, filed in February in federal court in Kentucky, accused The Post of practicing "a modern-day form of McCarthyism" by targeting student Nicholas Sandmann, The suit said the paper had used "its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles ... to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the president."<br /><br />Sandmann, a junior at Covington Catholic High School, became a target for outrage after a video of him standing face-to-face with the Native American Phillips while wearing a red "Make America Great Again" (MAGA) hat surfaced in January. Sandmann was one of a group of students from Covington attending the anti-abortion March for Life in Washington while Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples' March on the same day.<br /><br />Sandmann and the Covington students were initially accused of initiating the confrontation, but other videos and the students' own statements showed that they were verbally accosted by a group of black street preachers who were shouting insults at them and a group of Native Americans. Sandmann and Phillips have both claimed they were trying to defuse the situation.<br /><br />more at:
