As NewsBusters has previously reported, NBC marched a hard line to smear the Covington Catholic kids as racists in a viral video face-off with a Native American activist. NPR talk show host Joshua Johnson, a panelist on Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press, dragged the smears into a discussion of the government shutdown.

According to Johnson, “if you want to look for an image that actually speaks to this, it’s probably those protesters who were on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the Native American man who was beating the drum, Nathan Phillips, and those kids and the Make America Great Again hats that were kind of smirking at him and kind of looking down their noses at him.” Johnson connected the ultimately misleading original videotape to the debate over the wall, saying “this is about xenophobia. For many Americans, this is about race.”

Johnson continued to use the “morality” argument regarding the wall, citing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s description of the wall as an “immorality,” asking “how do you make a political solution to a moral quandary?” Johnson attempted to answer his own question: “for many Americans, for many people of color and I’m not speaking of all people of color, for the Rashida Talibs in this country, for the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes in this country, they are tired of political solutions to moral problems.”

Fellow panelist Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute strongly pushed back on Johnson’s analysis: “The problem that you have is when you start suggesting that anyone who wants a wall is…or no, not many. I don’t want to be unfair to you. But that many who want this are actually racists, it causes a real hardening on the other side. There are plenty of people, including 35-plus Democratic Senators, who wanted a wall, signed up to a wall, and who I don’t think are racists.”

Johnson appeared to backpedal later on, talking about how “there are some experts who do believe there are certain kind of barriers in certain parts of the border that make perfect sense.” Johnson then appeared to reject Pelosi’s dismissal of a wall as immoral: “so saying it’s inherently an immorality may be true in some people’s hearts, but there are pragmatic ways in which certain kinds of barriers along certain parts of the border have helped.”

Hopefully, Johnson and other media figures will begin backpedaling their statements about the Covington Catholic students, as a handful of media organizations already have. Hopefully this, along with the Buzzfeed story, will teach the media not to rush to judgment.

A transcript of the relevant portion of Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press is below. Click “expand” to read more.