Greatly looking forward to how beat twists himself in knots to interpret this one as "factually accurate".

Neither your, nor my politics have absolutely nothing to do with the accuracy of your information, though if anything, we should hold our own side to a higher standard. There are so so many easily verifiable things to write about, that its beyond pointless to trash our credibility over things that are proven inaccurate with a little bit of fact checking. I mean, Phillips being the wrong age to have been in Vietnam, as he claimed to Vox, would have been trivial to detect with any fact checking at all, and should have raised flags about the rest of his narrative.

No one here is even trying to advance narrative high school boys are angels, with a bit a of digging it's pretty easy to find things that Covington Catholic does may well deserve the level of public shaming that this story got.

However in this case, the entire narrative has been pretty widely disputed, Caitlin Flanagan does it much more elegantly than I could.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must...

As for the source, why not go to the original, like any responsible journalist should have, copy of the full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwNyOD8FIQk

Feel free to tell me when you hear them chanting "Build a wall", I haven't heard it.

The first widely reported, and easily proven incorrect fact is that Nathan Phillips is a Vietnam Veteran, see fairly through coverage of that here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/native-elder-nathan-phillips...

So really you're asking me to believe the narrative of someone who is proven to be lying about his military service, with no corroborating video of his claims, which just seems a bit ludicrous.

edited: spelling

Even after you have fallen victim to the very thing you are arguing isn't a problem - you still don't see it as a problem? It is a very big problem that these articles are being destructively modified. They are whipping up people that are already so freaked out that they think the President is both Hitler and a Russian agent, and people like you are left wondering what the big deal is when you look at the results of stealth edits.

   -- a young man wearing a self-assured smirk and a red “Make America Great Again”
   ++ a young man wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat

   -- More video shows Phillips wiping away tears in reaction to the harassment.
   ++ More video shows Phillips wiping away tears after the incident.

You can be sure that a huge number of tweets and facebook posts, by politicians and journalists/pundits promoting the story, frequently found in the sidebar of articles like this - got memory holed as well.

Don't bother with the "you don't know my politics" shtick, your overly sensitive reaction leaves the writing all over the wall on that point. You wouldn't be so defensive if it didn't strike close to home.

This would be less silly if what you were pretending is so obscure and nuanced was not actually as plain as day.

I took your invitation to reread, and only needed to go as far as the second paragraph: "In some shots, the teens appear to be shouting “build that wall, build that wall.”"

This is false. Not an opinion, not a narrative, a plainly false statement.

My "contradictory sources with at least the same level of journalistic respectability" is any of the videos of the event themselves, is that a credible enough source for you? The full-length video was available at the time of the writing of this article and Vox did not make any effort to verify what they wrote against it.

They lied, period. This is not that difficult to understand. Do try to keep up.

I believe that you are making a mistake when you say "not an opinion" in your (parent) post.

The words "appear to be" in one of the above quotes precisely indicates that this is a statement of opinion, and not a statement of fact. When we say "the wall is blue", we are talking about the color of the wall factually. When we say "the wall appears blue", we are talking about how someone sees the wall, which is a subjective observance; the wall may appear to be a color other than blue to someone else with a different pair of eyes.

At least one word, "is", refers to things as a matter of fact. Other words like "appears", "seems", or the sub-phrase "I think", are indicators that we're probably talking about a statement of opinion. This may be a useful rule to follow when reading news stories. I think it seems relevant here. (SwIdt?)

Your argument would be more interesting to read if it didn't include personal attacks (which are against HN rules).