Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann has been filing lawsuits against mainstream media outlets for unethically targeting him and his classmates during a protest at the Lincoln Memorial over the January 18th weekend. The latest lawsuit has been filed against NBC Universal from the L. Lin Wood P.C., law firm for $250 million.
The news came courtesy of a tweet from Lin Wood on May 1st, 2019, who linked to the Dropbox containing the details of the suit.
Washington Post, CNN, and now NBC/MSNBC. The journey for justice for Nicholas Sandmann & for media accountability continues. More to follow. False accusers should not rest easy. https://t.co/hlF8dVvdqo
— Lin Wood (@LLinWood) May 1, 2019
Washington Times summarized the gist of the suit, quoting the relevant section, which reads…
“This action for defamation arises out of television and online reporting by NCBUniversal Media, LLC, which published false and defamatory accusations against Plaintiff Nicholas Sandmann (“Nicholas”), a minor, the 16-year-old student who stood quietly for several minutes after being unexpectedly confronted without explanation by Nathan Phillips (“Phillips”), a Native American activist, who beat a drum and sang loudly within inches of his face on January 18, 2019, at the Lincoln Memory (the “January 18 incident”). […]
“[…] NBCUniversal created a false narrative by portraying the ‘confrontation’ as a ‘hate crime’ committed by Nicholas,”
This is true.
In fact, NBC didn’t even bother to wipe out the evidence that the document references. There are 13 saved instances of the original NBC News video that was captured over on the Wayback Machine from when NBC Universal ran the piece on January 20th, 2019.
The video is titled “Nathan Phillips, Native American man harassed by high schoolers, tells his story”.
The seven minute video is still live as of the writing of this article over on the NBC News website.
The story was syndicated across NBC Universal’s websites, including MSN.com, where the article is still live from when it aired on January 20th, 2019.
As pointed out by the Washington Examiner, mainstream news media ran with the narrative that Nicholas Sandmann was somehow harassing Nathan Phillips, and sought to direct condemnation and disparagement toward the boys through the coordinated publication of news across the NBC Universal family of websites.
In connection with other mainstream news media, such as CNN and the Washington Post, millions of people were incited to harass and send death threats to the Covington kids based on disinformation campaigns from mainstream outlets.
In reality, the video snippets they showed to rally anger from the populace was just a small piece of a much larger story involving multiple parties. It turns out that in the full video, the Covington kids were the most innocent of the parties involved, as they did nothing but stand on the steps waiting for their bus to arrive when they were accosted with harassment from Black Israelites. You can see the full video courtesy of C.M. Butler.
This isn’t anything new from NBC. Keep in mind that they also fabricated news against #GamerGate in order to smear the consumer revolt against unethical journalism and media practices taking place across enthusiast and mainstream outlets.
Sandmann also sued the Washington Post for $250 million, and CNN for $275 million. The Washington Post attempted to defend their reporting, but the social media escapades and lack of adhering to the facts led to them encouraging more harassment against the boys instead of diffusing the situation.
A lot of people have cheered on Sandmann’s lawsuits because the mainstream media has managed to get away with a lot of unethical, false reporting for years while suffering zero backlash. While the lawsuit wouldn’t kill off the mainstream news outlets, it could definitely put a big enough dent in them to potentially get them to change their ways, lest they collapse under the weight of their own hubris and corruption.
Given that there’s plenty of irrefutable evidence proving that NBC and its sister sites engaged in calumny, it’s just a matter of getting the case into court and milking them for everything they’re worth. I’m sure some of the major networks will attempt to settle out of court, but hopefully Sandmann goes all the way to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
(Thanks for the news tip Mugen Tenshin)
