SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES

Dori: What would Covington story have been before smartphones?

Jan 22, 2019, 2:22 PM | Updated: 2:34 pm

The Covington students saga was one of the most despicable events in mainstream media history.

Politicians and celebrities literally wanted to destroy their lives, and even called for the students to be physically harmed. One Twitter user wanted to lock them in the school and burn it down.

It was a 60-second video clip that started all of this, beginning with a Brazilian Twitter bot that linked to other Twitter bots. Based on that clip, you had the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS trying to destroy the lives of these children.

RELATED: Dori | Covington kids did nothing wrong, journalism died this weekend

Then you had two hours of video coverage, most of which I have now watched, that gave proper context to the incident. Now, everyone in the media is desperately trying to delete and retract their tweets. And by the way, it wasn’t just the liberal media sources — the National Review wrote a despicable piece on the Covington kids. Across the board, political correctness was more important than having facts.

Here’s what I’m wondering — before we had phones with cameras and the ability to take photos and video everywhere, the capability to get the full context of a story and exonerate people — how many lives did the media destroy? If all you had were those 60 seconds, those kids’ lives would be ruined. How many times did the media choose a target because of the incredible bias, and steamroll those people?

The original video that was retweeted so many times was said to belong to a teacher and self-proclaimed advocate in California named Talia. But then people started looking at the account and wondering, how would a teacher tweet, on average, 130 times a day and have over 40,000 followers? Then people started tracking that, and it turns out that ‘Talia the California teacher’ is actually a Twitter account that originated in Brazil. Twitter suspended that account after this was revealed. But that’s the account that was retweeted so many times by journalists and celebrities and the public.

Here’s what I know. There are a lot of forces that want to destroy America. China wants to destroy America from within. That’s the Marxist principle. You destroy from within, and then rebuild in a Marxist image. These Twitter bots that stir up dissent and create such sharp divisions among Americans as we saw this past weekend are prime evidence of those who want to destroy us.

When media outlets run with that story based on a 30-second video, their job is to fact-check. And they failed to do that.

There are people who despise these children simply because they wore MAGA hats. When I coached basketball, there was a girl who wore a Che Guevera t-shirt. Did I think she was a Marxist, or supported shooting dissidents in the head? Of course not. She was probably just trying to be a rebel or make a fashion statement. And that’s what these kids were doing. Rebellion in youth used to be encouraged. Now, I guess, every kid has to think the same. Kids are programmed that they must all think alike, following the leftist ideology of the public schools.

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Dori: What would Covington story have been before smartphones?