Nathan Phillips, 'Vietnam War veteran,' never fought in the Vietnam War

The Washington Post has issued a major correction to its story detailing the heavily reported back-and-forth between Native American leftist activist Nathan Phillips and the Catholic school teenagers he approached in Washington, D.C., over the weekend. 

Countless legacy media outlets and media personalities have described Phillips as a "Vietnam War veteran" or a variation of the phrase to describe a veteran who fought in the Vietnam War. We now know Phillips served in the military but not on a foreign battlefield.

They all turned out to be incorrect. In a massive correction Tuesday, the Washington Post reports that Phillips served in the Marines but “was never deployed in Vietnam.” Before correction, the Washington Post story claimed he had “fought in the Vietnam War.”

Some outlets appear to be engaged in full damage-control mode, while others that reported the fake news about Phillips have failed to correct their stories.

The New York Times incorrectly describes him as a “Native American veteran of the Vietnam War.” 

CNN has run misleading chyrons, and its on-air broadcasts have described Phillips as a Vietnam War veteran.

BuzzFeed, Slate, the BBC, HuffPost, and many others described him as a “Vietnam War veteran.”

USA Today went with “Vietnam veteran.”

Vogue falsely claimed that Phillips “served as an infantryman in the Vietnam War.”

And that small list of course doesn’t include the mountains of politicians, celebrities, media figures, and leftist “journalists” who anointed Phillips with war veteran status.

By attributing “war veteran” status to Nathan Phillips, the institutional press and pundit class added a layer of fake news to a story that was already fake news.

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