CNN Hit With $275M Defamation Suit Over Covington Fake News
CNN Hit With $275M Defamation Suit Over Covington Fake News. The lawsuit over the Covington incident has hit CNN. They now face $275M in compensatory and punitive damages for their incorrect reporting about Nicholas Sandmann.People were outraged that CNN would push fake news and lies from Nathan Phillips without question and smear the Covington kids without investigation. The suit claims they made several videos, tweets, and reports that were incorrect and CNN failed to do basic journalistic work.But why do media companies push this kind of news without checking facts? Its the "Trump Bump." Even if the news is fake they still get clicks and still make money. There is nothing but money to be made form posting this fake news about Trump and the MAGA Kids.
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The next major lawsuit from the Covington High School kids has dropped.
Lawyers for Nicholas Sandman yesterday announced they have filed a lawsuit against CNN to the tune of $275 million.
Now, about a week ago, we heard they were planning on announcing soon, but this is it, the official announcement.
This comes just about a month after we heard that Washington Post was being sued for $250 million.
Now, there is some other news in this area.
Recently, the New York Post issued an editorial statement, not a correction, and was just slammed by the lawyers for Nicholas Sandman.
But I also want to address the issue of why the fake news persists, why it's happening, and some of the ramifications.
I have talked about this before, but today, let's start by talking about exactly what's happening with this lawsuit against CNN.
They've also dropped a video explaining why they're suing, and then we'll take a look at the issue of the Trump bump and the lucrative nature of producing fake news.
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From Reuters, CNN hit with $275 million defamation suit by Kentucky student.
A Kentucky teenager sued CNN on Tuesday for defamation, saying the cable network falsely conveyed to its viewers that he was the face of an unruly hate mob confronting a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in January.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandman in federal court in Kentucky, seeks $275 million in compensatory and punitive damages over the videotaped incident in the nation's capital.
The complaint said that CNN aired four defamatory broadcasts and nine online articles falsely accusing Sandman, 16, and his classmates of engaging in racist conduct.
The CNN accusations are totally and unequivocally false, and CNN would have known them to be untrue had it undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication, the complaint said.
The complaint said CNN exhibited a bias against President Donald Trump by focusing on Sandman and other Covington students because they were wearing red caps emblazoned with the president's Make America Great Again slogan.
Trump has a contentious relationship with CNN, frequently calling it fake news.
Last month, Sandman sued the Washington Post for $250 million over its reporting of the same incident.
Earlier today, the lawyers for Nicholas Sandman published this video, outlining several issues they took with the media, talking about the media giants and why they were suing, and the damages that resulted from this kid being falsely attacked by these smears.
Co-counsel for Nicholas Sandman, Todd McMurtry, issued an exclusive appearance on Fox News saying, What CNN's tagline is, facts first.
And what we believe their reporting was in this circumstance was, lies first, cover up second.
And facts not yet determined by that organization, McMurtry said.
The attorneys said that what the news network reported was without any reasonable investigation.
They took something straight off Twitter that had been in essence manipulated so that it told one story and they reported it as truth.
McMurtry said they're also looking very closely at reporting on the story from NBC The Associated Press, HBO for the conduct of Bill Maher, as well as individual people like Kathy Griffin, who sent out these horrible tweets that are called doxxing.
This is the second official lawsuit filed by the lawyers of Nicholas Sandman, but there is some context pertaining to the Washington Post lawsuit that I think we should go over.
This story from March 2nd.
The Washington Post issues editor's note over early Covington coverage.
The editor's note isn't a correction or an apology.
It's simply stating that they were reporting what everyone else was reporting, and they have subsequently corrected the story.
According to The Hill, The Washington Post issued an editor's note Friday over its early coverage of a viral exchange between a student from Covington Catholic High School and a Native American veteran.
The paper said subsequent evidence including reporting unsurfaced video and a student statement clarifies the interaction and either contradicts or fails to confirm the post's initial stories.
In response to the editor's note, we saw this story from Fox News.
Covington High student's legal team slams Washington Post editor's note, says paper doubled down on its lies.
The high-powered attorneys representing Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandman penned a scathing response to the Washington Post's recent editor's note calling the paper's attempt to whitewash the encounter between the Kentucky student and a Native American activist too little and too late.
Late on Friday, the Post published an editor's note admitting that subsequent information either contradicted or failed to confirm accounts relayed in its initial article.
The editor's note was not satisfactory to Sandman's legal team.
The Washington Post rushed to claim leadership of a mainstream and social media mob of bullies who falsely attacked, vilified, and threatened Nicholas Sandman, an innocent 16-year-old boy.
A statement posted on the law firm's website said, The Friday night efforts by the Post to whitewash its wrongdoing
were untimely, grossly insufficient, and did little more than perpetuate
the lies it published.
Lies that will haunt and adversely impact Nicholas for the rest of his life.
The statement continued, The Post ignored its own culpability and wrongdoing.
Post General Counsel Jay Kennedy's letter stated that the Post provided accurate coverage.
It did not.
And its belated public relations effort changed nothing and fooled no one.
The Post made no effort to retract and correct the lies it published.
There's a lot going on here.
Part of the suit hangs on whether or not the courts will determine that Nicholas Salmon is a limited public figure or a private figure.
This is actually alarming if you were to ask me.
Nicholas Salmon is a private figure by all reasonable accounts.
He's just some kid standing on the stairs at the Lincoln Memorial.
However, They're arguing that because he was filmed and the video went viral, he was inadvertently a public figure, also known as a limited public figure.
This means they don't have the same standards when reporting on this story as they would for any other private individual.
In a story from the Atlantic, they say, Sandman is not a public figure like a politician or a traditional celebrity, but he could be deemed a limited-purpose public figure, a legal distinction for people who have thrust themselves to the forefront of particular controversies in order to influence the resolution of issues in the world.
Or Sandman could be considered an involuntary public figure who has been thrust into the public spotlight against his will.
This can apply to anyone at the center of a public controversy, despite whether or not that person willed it.
If Salmon is determined to be a public figure of any classification, he will need to demonstrate not only that the Post published false statements with negligence, but that it acted with reckless disregard for the truth as outlined in New York Times v. Sullivan.
He's a private figure, not a public one, says Leda Knott, the executive director of the Freedom Forum Institute's First Amendment Center.
So he only needs to prove that the Washington Post published the story negligently, meaning that it didn't do everything reasonably necessary to determine whether the story was true or false.
And Nicholas Sandman's lawyers agree.
However, if the Washington Post and CNN opt to use this defense, it will actually be really interesting.
They'd effectively have to claim that their journalists at the major mainstream news outlets are less effective at their job than random users on Twitter.
First of all, I accurately covered the story from start to finish because I didn't jump to conclusions.
Many individuals on Twitter quickly found there was other video that contradicted the initial narrative.
Why wasn't the Washington Post or CNN able to figure this out?
Is it possible that the journalists at the Washington Post and CNN are less effective at their jobs than random people on Twitter?
Unfortunately, that seems to be the case.
Because many people on Twitter quickly uncovered the truth.
Now, not everyone on Twitter did.
Many celebrities ran with the narrative.
Many people on the left ran with the narrative because it was convenient.
But to those who actually took even a few minutes To investigate what actually happened, they found the truth.
Because the truth is, after the first video went viral, another video was quickly published showing a wider view of the encounter.
And I'm not talking about the two-hour livestream.
I'm talking about a subsequent video that was extended that showed Nicholas Sandman was just standing there and didn't do anything.
Why Washington Post and CNN couldn't figure that out or find that is beyond me, but maybe it's just that they're incompetent.
The ramifications of this story persist.
Washington Post still has an op-ed up saying nothing justifies what the Covington students did.
Unfortunately, they didn't really do anything.
And a subsequent private investigation found that they didn't really do anything.
This is just one story I've pulled up as an example.
It's an op-ed, so I don't believe the lawyers can sue the Washington Post for opinion pieces.
But you can see that their false reporting led to a widespread belief that somehow these kids did something wrong.
That even days later, Bill Maher still said Nicholas Sandman approached Nathan Phillips.
It's just not true.
But all of these opinion pieces are going to persist off of the fake news.
And so this brings me to my final question.
Why does something like this happen?
Well, there are many reasons.
We've talked a lot about what happened with Covington, but for one, the Trump bump is a huge issue.
These news organizations know that negative stories about conservatives and Donald Trump generate tons of traffic.
Here we had a shocking story of a kid wearing a MAGA hat being offensive, but that's just not true.
However, news organizations couldn't resist.
The story was too juicy, at least in my opinion.
So instead of fact-checking, they rushed to publish without knowing what actually happened.
Because there's a reason for it.
These news organizations know that even if they publish fake news, they keep the money from these stories.
When all of these news outlets, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, CNN, published this fake news, they got ad revenue.
They saw a bump in their traffic, and then later when they correct, they keep that traffic.
It doesn't go away.
The money was already made.
We've seen many stories about the Trump bump.
A year ago, the Washington Examiner published this.
Trump bump boosts news industry.
New York Times adds 500,000.
Wall Street Journal, 200,000.
The story says a new global media poll said that just 38% of Americans trust the mainstream media near the lowest level in the world.
But the desire for news about President Trump, the so-called media Trump bump, is turning into a moneymaker for the industry.
We have seen a significant increase in the United States in the wake of the Trump victory,
where overall payment, including one-off payments and donations, has risen to 16 percent, with
ongoing digital subscriptions running at half that, 8 percent.
These findings are consistent with figures released by news organizations, which show
a significant Trump bump.
The New York Times added around 500,000 digital subscribers in the six months since the election,
and the Wall Street Journal has added around 200,000 members.
Our data show much of this growth has come from those on the left and the young, effectively showing support for the media's efforts to hold the president and his policies to account.
But it's actually not that simple.
While we can say many people do want to see the president held accountable, in all likelihood the Trump bump is a result of negative press coverage around Trump confirming the worldview of people who don't like them.
So the media is now incentivized to produce content that supports this new audience base.
Many people have accused me of the same thing.
They say Tim is specifically targeting individuals and what they don't understand is that there's a difference between an individual who has opinions and talks about their opinions and a news organization with an editorial board that has to make a calculated decision on what they cover.
For me, I talk about news stories I find interesting.
That's it.
Why is my channel pointing in one direction so often?
Because it's what I personally care about.
You can look at my second channel and see that I sometimes talk about video games.
I just talk about the things I like.
You'll notice on the Subverse channel, which I promoted earlier in this video, we actually talk about a wide range of issues.
That's because Subverse is meant to be a brand and be generally informative.
We want to focus on things we find interesting, but it's not about my politics or my opinions.
So sometimes we talk about climate change.
Technology.
New research.
We do interviews.
The Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times have editorial boards that decide what they should or shouldn't cover.
But you have to recognize that as businesses, when their paying subscribers expect a certain type of content, they favor it.
They shouldn't.
Now, with Subverse, I have absolutely no intention of producing content that's going to favor the whims of any individual.
We just want to be generally informative.
But it's different when I'm talking about my personal views and what I actually care about.
While this channel tends to be more newsy and analytical, it is my personal perspective and opinion, so I obviously have a bias.
I don't know where the narrative came from that I didn't, a lot of people claim that I'm objective, I just try to be honest.
You'll watch my videos, you'll see I frequently talk about very similar things, but I try to source everything to the best of my ability, and I try to generally be honest.
I don't necessarily care who wins or loses, I just want to know what is or isn't working.
These news organizations, on the other hand, are businesses, and that means when they see 500,000 new subscribers, well, they're going to start producing what the subscribers want.
Or, as I was told by a news organization I used to work for, they're going to side with the audience.
Earlier on my second channel, I made a video talking about how the Democrats have become completely disconnected from America, and the evidence is that the largest federation of labor unions in the U.S., the AFL-CIO, has come out against the Green New Deal.
Whatever this Trump bump is in media, it's making people go crazy, at least in my opinion.
Mainstream Democrats supporting a bill that is opposed by labor unions, that is seemingly opposed by most Americans, yet they keep pushing polls claiming that's not true.
They claim that they're the new face of the Democratic Party, but the working class in this country, regular Americans, do not agree with it.
This is the result of driving towards the Trump bump.
The media companies know they make money off of this anti-Trump narrative, They think that most Americans like what these far-left progressives are pushing, so they chase after it.
I think this is a result of the mechanics of social media.
That outrage and anger drives traffic.
So those who are the most insane, pushing the most aggressive hot takes, will get more shares and more retweets.
We then see many top Democrats line up to support the Green New Deal that even labor unions oppose.
They are absolutely disconnected with the average American.
Because the media is chasing after the bump.
There were recently layoffs announced at New York Mag around 32.
We've repeatedly seen layoffs.
These companies are dying.
And in their desperation, they chase the Trump bump, among other things.
Because it makes them money.
Because they have an obligation to survive.
And I don't blame them for it.
And this is the way they're doing it.
But it's causing problems, it's causing rifts, and it's leading people on the left and Democrats to believe absolutely ridiculous things.
Covington is just one more example of the insanity bred by the Trump bump.
People desperately trying to chase that narrative, to get those clicks, to hop on board with the mob, because it gets them traffic and they want to be involved.
They make money, otherwise they die.
Hopefully, the fake news dies when these companies can't make money from it anymore, but so long as they can, These kinds of deranged stories will continue.
Democrats and the left will continually be fractured by this narrative because it's fake news.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
You can follow me on Mines at TimCast.
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Thanks for hanging out.
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