The Covington Chronicles - When an "Ecounter" Goes Viral

One day, two people in a standoff, three marches, hundreds of high school students, one hat, one smirk, and many versions of the same story. Hello, I'm Molly McPherson, and you are listening to the Confident Communications Podcast. Podcast. A podcast where you'll learn how to communicate online and off so you can feel heard, seen, and relevant in the 21st century. And this week, a 21st century story. To be sure, it is the Covington Chronicles. And if there was ever a story for me to talk about that perfectly aligns with the purpose of the show, it's this one. We have social media, viral video, mainstream media, tweets, celebrity tweets, mothers hiring, PR firms, polarized public opinion, and of course, a response from the tweeter in chief himself, President Donald Trump. Initially, I didn't want to talk about this story because it brought about so much anger and such strong opinion. But on the other hand, when the number of people asking me about this incident reached the double digits, I knew it was a topic to discuss. So here I am discussing the Covington Chronicles, the viral encounter that spread around the world. I want to examine the story from three angles. First, the event itself, what happened, who are the players. Second, the fallout. How this incident affected the lives and the brands of so many. And third, how it changed how we look at incidences now that can happen in the public space, what happens in the mainstream media, what happens online, and what happened or what should happen with our behaviors when there is a phone to be seen. Now, I have a lot of opinions on this case. Now, first, I have an opinion as a PR communicator. Of course, immediately when this story happened, I thought about public reputation management, how to crisis proof your brand if you're a business or if you're a person. And I also had more personal opinions. I had an opinion as a mother of teenagers. I had an opinion as a mother of a teenage son. I had an opinion as a Catholic, as a former Catholic high school student, and as a woman. But the only opinion I want to focus on is the one that provides a lesson from this mess. What did we learn from these events and from the fallout? Now the scene. It's January 18th, the National Mall in Washington, D.C. the event, the Indigenous Peoples March, it was a demonstration that included speech, prayers, song and dance. And what was lost in the news, I think, was that this march was nationwide. It was simultaneous in a number of different communities where there were solidarity marches, about a dozen or so locations. Now, the hook. In the late afternoon, a small faction of a group broke off and caused A messy collision at the intersection of five members of the black Hebrew Israelites, the bhi, members of the Indigenous March, and students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky. This three way confrontation became very complicated and very public. Like wildfire public. Like setting off a media firestorm public. You all know, if you're listening, I'm sure you know about the story now, the image. Nick Sandman, with two N's and now known in the press as the MAGA teen, standing eye to eye with Omaha tribe member Nathan Phillips, another character in the story. He's a Marine veteran who was reported to have served in Vietnam. That was later retracted. Phillips walked up to the boys while chanting a traditional Native American powwow song. We're all familiar with this visual. We saw it. But this video eventually caused a media reaction against everyone involved. However, the boys of Covington Catholic, they were up first. Now, when the video first hit, everyone saw it from one point of view and that was the point of view of the boys in the crowd. We could see the chanting, the mocking gestures, the laughter, boys that had their phones up taking video. And we saw lots of, lots of mega merch, a lot of the mega hats. And we saw just teenage boys acting like teenage boys. Now left in the wake of the first run of the story was the reputation of the school. Of course, everyone heard of Covington Catholic after this video went viral. The boys, of course, it also brought in the Kentucky Diocese of the Roman Catholic Church and especially the teenager at the center of the story, Nick Sandman. The Internet and the social media universe collectively dumped on this kid. The smirk, the hat, the flexing by Sandman marked him as public teenager enemy number one. The clip of Sandman's smirk went viral and where it was met with immediate outrage was on Twitter. And there was an avalanche of negative media coverage. Everyone, and I mean everyone, with the exception of people in Kentucky probably, and his family hated this kid. Sandman and his family allegedly received death threats and experienced a lot of bad press. Everyone. How they do it nowadays is they go straight to social media and they start looking under every nook and cranny online. And honestly, I cannot imagine going through this. I don't think anyone can. Sandman's mother immediately retained a public affairs firm in town. And note that I said public affairs. That's the government side of public relations. By Sunday, the firm came forward with a statement. Now, the public affair firm that they hired was called Switch Media. And one of its founders, Scott Jennings, is a Republican strategist who has worked on Four presidential campaigns and is also a senior advisor for a super pack for Senator Mitch McConnell. This is important because already in the story we can see the tilt. We know that when it's a Republican public affairs firm, public affairs, again is very government centric. You'll see a lot of public affairs jobs in Washington D.C. so you know from that that the response is going to be tilted, you know, more to one side here. And when they hired this firm, run Switch, which as an run switch to me sounds like run quick, which is the diametrical extreme in crisis communications. We can't fix this. Run quick anyway. But the statement was the turning point in the public perception of portraying Sandman not as an antagonist, but as this young innocent hoping to defuse a tense situation with adults. And it did beg the question, how much did this conservative firm help craft the narrative now of a mega hat wearing teen that was being unfairly attacked in the media? This wasn't just any teen. This was a teen wearing a red hat surrounded by kids. And so it became polarized. By Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon when the release was out and viral, after all the Sunday news coverage, we had two very distinct sides of the story. Now, the statement, it was two pages long and it was well written and it was a well written account of what happened. But to me, it lacks one critical piece that would have shifted this Nick Sandman into more of a positive character. It was lacking remorse. What they did with this statement is they wanted to cultivate positive public opinion because that, after all, I think, is the motto of their PR firm. It's on their website. And I think they only half succeeded. The audience that wanted to support Sandman and his classmates certainly felt that the statement conveyed a sense of truth and empowerment to what Nick and his buddies were saying. You know, we were attacked and we did nothing wrong. However, there is the other half of the population. The other side that noticed it was missing that certain sense of humanness, you know, of remorse. It's what most people might do or might say in that situation. So instead, the statement was propping Nick up as you know, he was now going to be the spokesperson for the teenage right. And technology now has radically changed the way that we communicate. And this PR firm, this public affairs firm, did a multimedia attack on how to change the perception of Nick Sandman and the Covington Catholic teenagers. Because how we consume news now, it's not just reading a newspaper. It's not sitting down and walking across the living room and turning on the television to watch the same News station at 6pm or 11pm every night. It's about what's trending across the world, what's trending online. If you want to do an all out attack, you don't just write a press release. There are other things that needed to be done. Run switch had a job. It was probably a multifaceted campaign. Step one, phase one was going to be the media statement. But the second thing that they needed to do is they needed to deploy a team to find the other side, like literally and figuratively. They figuratively wanted to get the other side of the story, but literally they needed evidence that there was another side. So we do know for certain. And my PR antenna went whoop when, when the new video came out, showing it from the perspective of a video towards not only the kids, but from the people in the indigenous march as well as the people from the bni. And you could see the attacks, you could see the verbal slurs that were being hurled at these kids. We saw the other side of the story. Every kid at that event, I'm sure was asked to scour their phones like their life depended on it. Find video of someone attacking you, of someone attacking Nick. And they did. The Internet slowly started to fill up and social media slowly started to drip. The new video out there, we saw the other side. We saw the true instigators, the verbal attacks against these quote, unquote poor boys. Now this was not organic or by chance. This was part of the campaign. It was probably phase two. Now the nature of social things are going to spread. It's not that much work just to put out a couple videos and ask someone to share it. People are going to share any type of new imagery or video that they can. So this was a part of the PR crisis plan. They wanted to reframe the story from Nick the smirk to Nick the Vic, Nick the Victim. The firm kept at it and the next interview was with Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show. Now I have a link to the interview in the show notes. Now before we go to the interview and listen to some clips, I want to give you the optics. In case you haven't seen it, Nick Sandman is straight out of central casting for preppy teenage boys. He's wearing the half zip sweater pullover with the button down, shirt cut, hair off to the side. He does look terrified. His face does not move and the look on his face is saying, I need to remember what I'm supposed to say. I need to stay on message. They told me what to say. I need to remember it he definitely had coaches, he had PR handlers that gave him probably a very basic script to follow, and it was his job to. To follow it. Now, as a mother, I feel for this kid. That is a lot to handle for an adult, for a professional adult, for a professional communicator, much less a high school kid that has probably never been on television. It's a lot. He did not look like he had one ounce of remorse. Now, one reason is because his brain just did not have the bandwidth to handle that, but also because he. He truly, at this point, had been told by so many adults that he didn't have it. Even if he did have it at one point, it was drummed into his brain. You do not say you're sorry. You do not say you're sorry. Now, this is where Nick gets a pass from me here, because he's a teenager and he's just following the script written out by adults. Do you feel from this experience that you owe anybody an apology? Do you see your own fault in any way?

As far as standing there? I had every right to do so. I don't. I. My position is that I was not disrespectful to Mr. Phillips. I respect him. I'd like to talk to him. I mean, in hindsight, I wish we could have walked. Walked away and avoided the whole thing, but I can't say that I'm sorry for listening to him and standing there.

Sandman appeared stoic and emotionless, and he spoke in a very monotone voice throughout the entire interview. Stating that he wished to walk away was the closest he was ever going to get to remorse or saying that he was sorry. He never apologized. He never showed remorse. He never indicated he learned anything from this incident. The one true statement, he said he wished he would have walked away. Now, that I believe 100%, and I'm sure his parents said it to him, too. Why didn't you walk away? But I can't say that I am sorry. That's just bad. Bad public relations. That's just bad messaging. I would never, ever write those words in a statement for any client, ever. And here's the reason why. There are three pillars in crisis communication or crisis public relations. One, you want to acknowledge what happened if you're involved in any type of event where now your name or your organization or your brand is affected by this crisis. One, you want to acknowledge what happened by offering an apology or response or some type of ownership of your role in this crisis. Next, you put it into perspective. That's the. Yeah, but portion of it, Yes, I did this. Yes, I will admit to that. However, it was because so on and so forth. And then the third point is when you can discuss the changes, the promises, anything you can do to make it better, anything that you learned, whatever it is, this is your statement that's going to transition you out of it. Every single public relations person worth their salt is going to tell their client to do this. I am very, very surpr that they didn't. But at the same time, I'm not. There's a very deliberateness to the divisiveness of this. It was meant to be polarizing. And he was told, you are not going to apologize. I think because they wanted to have two very distinct sides of the story. Now, if I were working with Nick, or let's say this happened somewhere else and there wasn't the political pressure on it at all, I would have told Nick, just acknowledge your role in the incident. Yes, I was there. But put it into perspective. We were being shouted at and we were being insulted. I'm just a kid from Kentucky on my first trip to D.C. i was confused, and I have to admit, I was scared. I didn't know what was going on. But you know what I learned now? That actions do speak louder than words. I wish I would have walked away. Da da da da da da da. See how that works? If Nick would have done that, if Nick Sandman just would have acknowledged his role in it, it would have changed the entire narrative of the story. And now what really surprised me about the story is that it started to work. This is, I have to say, is a pretty good PR firm because next Nathan Phillips story, it starts to fall apart. Multiple tapes of the confrontation fail to support Phillips assertion that the students were aggressive or chanted about the wall. Asked why he approached the students, Phillips said he was trying to diffuse the confrontation between the students and the small group of the BHI who were shouting insults. The tables had turned. The media, the pundits, everyone was apologetic. People were apologizing for their tweets. Even Kathy Griffin, I think, backpedaled and deleted her tweet. And now some more fallout. Samantha Guthrie was under fire from both sides because of how she handled the interview. Liberals were upset and also conservatives were. But I think it was a lose lose for Savannah Guthrie from a public opinion point of view, but a win win for NBC and Savannah Guthrie from a ratings point of view. Now let's talk about the ancillary fallout. Who else or what else was affected by this? The diocese Of Covington first denounced the student's behavior. And the high school along with them issued a joint statement that the students behavior opposed the church's teaching on dignity and respect for a human person. Ironically, they're at a pro life march. They were condemned. So talk about your Catholic guilt. But then the diocese later apologized to the students. The bishop said that he felt harangued into reacting as quickly as he did, which surprised me. So he felt bullied, he felt pressured. So for now, the students, in the eyes of God in Kentucky, they are exonerated. The school, Covington Catholic was shut down. There were death threats against the school. People dissected the school and its community. People especially on Twitter. I went down a rabbit hole on someone's Twitter feed where they had investigated everything about Covington Catholic before it went black. And they shut down all their social media feeds and the website. They noted the lack of minorities in the school. They noted the all white male faculty. They noted Nick Sandman's social media accounts and it was heavily conservative. A lot of mega merch was seen in a lot of his posts. Now I think the people that saw the story for what it was just on the surface first thought the kids actions were irresponsible at best, reprehensible at worst. But they changed their views when they saw the additional video of the BNI group insulting the boys and Nathan Phillips walking into the crowd. They could now see Nick Sandman as the victim. But this was not a story about kids being harassed. This was not a story about a protest on the mall. And this is also not a story about social media going bad. You know, what was lost according to reports is that the kids were waiting for the, the bus. This does answer the charge of where were the adult chaperones and why did they let them stand there? Very critical parts of story, you know, were missed and were overlooked. And I know some, you know, people online, probably more the conservative people would say, you know, why did the media miss that? You know, why didn't the media report on that? It's just fake news. But the truth is I didn't see anyone report on that and no one mentioned it. I mean certainly you did hear where were the chaperones. But I didn't even notice until I really dug deep that it stated that they were waiting for a bus. And those insults from that group, well, they were bad. They were. That was just the kind of language to spark the temper of any teenager. And we can't forget these are teenagers. There were grown men hurling insults at Adolescents. And if you watch 100 minutes of the YouTube video, and I don't even want to admit to how many minutes I spent watching it, you could really see what this story is truly about. It's a story about threats of violence, about bigotry, anti Catholicism, homophobia. It's a story about race. It's a story now about our culture, where a hat symbolizes another type of hat, and a smirk symbolizes white elitism, where liberals will tweet about punching a kid in the face. This incident brings to light everything that's really, like, not great about our country and how divided we are. But I do think that there are two supporting characters that cause this issue to become so hateful and to become so charged online with just regular people, the hoi polloi who are commenting and speaking about it, whether it's at a coffee shop or online. We now have to change how we see these public events and these marches in the future, because it really comes down to this. It comes down to the optics. It comes down to the hat and to the smirk. That's what people are really upset about. That's the dividing point. The hat, some feel, is now starting to rival the hood of a Klansman. Plenty of good people wear the hat. Plenty of people who wear the hat are conservative and nothing else. And I'm sure plenty of people who got that hat, who wear the Make America Great Again hat, the MAGA hat. They have it because they got it during the campaign leading up to the presidency. Some of the people that wear the hat just support President Trump. And there's nothing wrong with supporting a candidate. But what has changed as this hat now symbolizes hateful positions against minorities, against women, against many, many groups. Also, the smirk. The smirk cements Nick Sandman's intent. The flex, the stance, the smirk, all mixed together. People aren't buying it. Without the two together, Nick Sandman and his classmates would have been the victims 100%. The narrative of this story would be these poor Kentucky boys from this Catholic school where they were in Washington, D.C. at a pro life march, supporting the women and the effort and the movement of pro life, and they were attacked by these radical groups. They would have been 100% exonerated. But the defiance, the writing, the public relations, that just the movement of sane. I'm not sorry. I have no remorse. The mega hat at a pro life rally. These are the optics that drew the line between both sides. So really, there are no winners and there are no losers. And there are two names that are now in viral Infamy. Nick Sandman and Nathan Phillips. So what can we learn if we strip away the opinion, the public opinion, the polarizing opinion that caused people to talk about this story? Let's bring it down to the communications. What can we learn? Well, one viral ain't nothing to mess with. If you are in a charged environment, it will be on video. And viral video lasts forever and ever and ever. And it will be replayed forever. Nick Sandman may get over this hump, but this video is going to follow him for the rest of his life. He will be a Trivial Pursuit answer for the rest of his life. Good or bad, everyone is going to know who Nick Sandman is. And if they don't know his name, he's going to be the mega hat smirky kid. Now the next piece of it too is the generations and how they reacted or how they were affected by this viral video. Now, Nathan Phillips, he seems like a man that probably doesn't even own an iPhone. He may, but I don't know. I may be generalizing here, but someone who's at the National Mall, you know, he's part of an indigenous people group. I'm not thinking that he's going to be holding up his phone. He's there. He was there to sing and to chant and to pray. And it probably never occurred to him when he started marching towards those boys that that march was going to be captured on video and that video was going to go viral. I may be wrong, but I don't think I am. Nick, on the other hand, he's a teenager. He's our Gen Z character and he absolutely should have known better. Every kid around him had his phone out. All of those kids were taking video. If there was one lesson, and there were many, many lessons being discussed in my household, one lesson out of all of it was if anything happens, remember you're going to be on video. So do something good on video, don't be bad, look good. That's, you know, the video is going to be a part of any incident in our future. And that was another piece of the story with Nick. He knew it was all on video too. That didn't work in his favor in my opinion. Next, if you work in any business, be prepared for any employee, any owner, customer, student, whatever, anyone can send you into a viral spin. Every single business needs to have a plan in place for that viral event. And this isn't a full blown crisis plan. It's just a in case of an emergency plan to manage from a social media perspective or from A website perspective. The website, the social media. These are the first places everyone will head when there is an event that ties your business or your organization or your brand into a news story. Covington Catholic had to shut down their website and eventually their entire campus because of the Fallout 3 video and imagery. Because we are now firmly rooted in the era of optics, it's important to keep in mind that what you are photographed, wearing or doing can speak a lot louder than what you say or what you think. I hear it all the time in my line of work. I am not going to let a millennial tell me, ba, ba ba, or I'm not going to do this because it's all fake news. I'm not going to change because one person tells me, does it speak like a certain generation? It does. I hear it all the time. And it's not to judge them. I mean, every generation is like this. This is just about the march through time. But I do tell them, you know, the world has changed from a communication perspective. In particular in this case, you could stay where you are in it, but you will be judged for it. It's no longer about one person telling you what to do. It's about a movement. There is momentum there that you cannot get away from. You may believe that a piece of clothing is just a piece of clothing, but that many people are going to judge you for that piece of clothing. No one says you have to change, but if you don't, other people will change it for you. That's it for this week on the Confident Communications Podcast. Please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook and share with me some of your views about the Covington Chronicles or what happened last week in Washington, D.C. thank you all for listening. I look forward to speaking with you next week. Bye for now.