Lost in much of the breaking news of late, Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann recently filed a 132-page, $275 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, $200 million of which is a claim for punitive damages.
Defamation is more or less alleged character assassination. Sandmann’s legal counsel filed a similar case against the Washington Post, a.k.a. Jeff Bezos’ blog, in early March. The so-called most trusted name in news, CNN waited nine days before reporting on its website it was named in the second case arising from Kentucky student Sandmann’s much-publicized January encounter with the Native American Elder.
Paragraph 12 of the federal lawsuit against fake news CNN states as follows:
“Contrary to its ‘Facts First’ public relations ploy, CNN ignored the facts and put its anti-Trump agenda first in waging a 7-day media campaign of false, vicious attacks against Nicholas, a young boy who was guilty of little more than wearing a souvenir Make America Great Again cap while on a high school field trip to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. to attend the January 18 March for Life.”
Leaving aside the merits of the Sandmann case, CNN essentially operates as a 24-7, anti-Trump infomercial.
Hopefully, U.S. airports will eventually stop taking the ratings-challenged Time-Warner-owned network’s money to air CNN in departure lounges.
Sandmann attorney Lin Wood and his team created a compelling 15-minute video embedded below that sets forth what it considers an accurate time line of what happened in an episode that made massive headlines plus generating outrage from blue-check Twitter.
Some legal observers have opined that the lawsuits may not survive initial defense procedural motions seeking a dismissal. “There is no doubt that Nicholas Sandmann was maligned and treated horribly by the media, including WaPo and CNN. But the legal landscape is very friendly to the press, so we’ll have to see how this unfolds in court,” law professor William Jacobson, who runs the Legal Insurrection blog, observed.
Sandmann’s team doesn’t seem it would give up just because of an early procedural roadblock, however. Any dismissal would be subject to an appeal. An out-of-court settlement without a finding of liability is also a possibility. Wood has previously indicated that he plans to take more media outlets to court on behalf of Nicholas Sandmann.
