This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, January 8, 2020:
Fox19 out of Newport, Kentucky, was the first to announce the out of court settlement of a $275 million defamation lawsuit brought against CNN by Nicholas Sandmann, a student at Covington Catholic High School (CovCath).
The lawsuit stemmed from an incident that CNN transformed into a transmission belt for its anti-Trump hatred. Following the incident last January at the Lincoln Memorial, CNN declared that Sandmann, then a junior at CovCath, was a racist. The network repeated the canard that Sandmann had confronted a Native American while wearing a MAGA (Make America Great Again) baseball cap, thus proving that Trump is a racist along with his followers.
Two videos released in the days following the event (see Sources below for links) showed no such thing, but by that time it was too late. For seven days, CNN, along with the Washington Post and NBC, promoted the lie. In fact, that additional footage showed that it was a hate group called the Black Hebrew Israelites that initially provoked the confrontation by hurling racial slurs and epithets at the students as they were waiting for their bus following a March for Life event. Nathan Phillips, part of a separate event taking place nearby, the Indigenous Peoples March, saw his opportunity and confronted the students.
Sandmann’s lead attorney, L. Lin Wood, said that “CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attack on Nicholas than the Washington Post. And CNN goes into millions of homes. They really went after Nicholas with the idea that he was part of a mob that was attacking the Black Hebrew Israelites, yelling racist slurs at the Black Hebrew Israelites. Totally false.”
The 15-minute YouTube video Wood created has been viewed more than two million times. In its lede into the video he published last February, he wrote, “Two weeks ago, the mainstream media, politicians, church officials, commentators, and celebrities rushed to judgment to wrongfully condemn, threaten, disparage and vilify Nick Sandmann based solely on a few seconds of an out-of-context video clip. It only takes 15 minutes to learn the truth. Here it is.”
Added Wood: “If you took the time to look at the full context of what happened that day, Nicholas Sandmann did absolutely nothing wrong. He was, as I’ve said to others, the only adult in the room. But you have a situation where CNN couldn’t resist the idea that here’s a guy with a young boy, that Make America Great Again cap on. So they go after him.”
And for that “rushing to judgment,” CNN is paying a steep price. Although the amount of the settlement of the $275 million lawsuit remains undisclosed, CNN’s reputation as a reliable reporter of the news has been further besmirched.
Wood held nothing back in his filing of Sandman’s lawsuit against CNN:
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