After the “Covington Catholic MAGA Kid vs. Native-American Drummer” post ran, a student journalist reached out from Clackamas Community College in Oregon to get a few of my thoughts on how speed and accuracy tend to bump into each other a lot in media these days.

(In case you missed it, the family of Nick Sandmann, the student in the video, is suing the Washington Post over its coverage of him. The suit, which asks for $250 million, argues that publication ran several “false and defamatory” articles and backed them up with similarly problematic tweets.)

The interview questions were good and in reading the responses I gave, I found myself saying, yet again, “Well, hell… I really need a filter. Or a translator from ‘Filak-ism’ to English.” Here’s one such moment:

TCP: What do you think the coverage of both the BuzzFeed story and the Covington Catholic Kids says about modern journalism?

A: I don’t know if this is necessarily a “modern journalism” thing, other than to say the reach of media is now able to do a lot more damage when a story goes south. It’s like if I were to be reckless with a firearm: If I’m reckless with a .22 pistol, I can hurt some people, but if I’m reckless with a rocket launcher, I can do a lot more damage. That’s the difference between things in the pre-digital era and now.

Yep. I definitely need a translator… In any case, you can read the whole exchange here.