The continuing fallout from last Friday's encounter between students from the Covington Catholic High School and Native American activist Nathan Phillips led to NBC's Today co-host Savannah Guthrie verbally attacking Nicholas Sandmann in what was supposed to be an interview, asking the Kentucky teen if he should apologize for his actions at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Despite Guthrie's liberal bias, Time magazine TV critic Judy Berman bitterly complained from --- wait for it --- the left for Guthrie’s “bizarre conversation” with the student “allowed him to defend himself” and “simply gave him an additional platform from which to proclaim his blamelessness” despite Guthrie’s “responsibility to help contextualize his actions.”
In her article, Berman stated that “Nicholas Sandmann isn’t sorry” despite becoming “a symbol of America’s bitter political polarization” by “seeming to stare down” Phillips “with a smirk on his face and a ‘Make America Great Again’ cap on his head.”
She also described the interview as a “bizarre conversation” in which the teenager was “[d]ressed in calming earth tones and betraying not the slightest trace of a smile” while being “nearly unrecognizable from the footage released days earlier.”
In addition, Berman outrageously asserted:
Though it’s impossible to know for sure whether he was coached, it’s also impossible to watch the interview without recalling that the boy’s family hired a PR firm with deep Republican ties soon after his image went viral.
Unfortunately, Today didn’t find time to inquire about that eyebrow-raising relationship -- or to ask many other questions that might have made the nine-minute segment worthwhile.
Berman also complained that Guthrie took “Sandmann at his word” and asked “a weak question about whether the hat might have contributed to the face-off with Phillips” and “received a noncommittal response: ‘It’s possible.’”
The Catholic student “reiterated that he and his Covington classmates had been provoked by slurs from Black Hebrew Israelites, whose role in the confrontation wasn’t apparent in the viral footage,” she added.
When Guthrie asked about the impact the media attention had on his family, Sandmann replied: “It’s been terrible. People have threatened our lives.”
As if her previous comments weren’t liberal enough, Berman also stated:
The thing is, this story was never really about who said or did what to inflame whom at the Capitol. High schoolers getting into trouble on school trips is not news.
The video went viral because the images it contained drew such an immediate, visceral response....[O]bservers on the left felt certain that they were peering into the soul of white, male privilege.
“Some conservative pundits have framed 16-year-old Sandmann as the target of liberal bullying,” she continued, but people also judged the teen “because he was a white person wearing a hat that has become a symbol of policies many interpret as racist and xenophobic -- and because he was a boy attending a demonstration in support of a position many view as misogynistic.”
“When all was said and done, the interview was just one more win for a PR team that has largely succeeded in keeping the values Sandmann and his friends expressed in Washington out of a controversy that has everything to do with them,” the Time critic concluded.
