Having already filed multi-million dollar lawsuits against the Washington Post and CNN, attorneys for Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann struck against this week, bringing a $275 million lawsuit against NBCUniversal. The reason for the lawsuits are all the same; they are seeking legal redress for coverage of the controversial “false narrative” that these outlets used to smear their MAGA-hat adorned client back in January. In the lawsuit, the attorneys accuse NBC News and MSNBC of pursuing a fact-free story because they were blinded by their “anti-Trump agenda.”
From the Washington Times:
The lawsuit, the third filed by the Sandmann attorneys against major media outlets, alleged that NBC targeted the Covington Catholic High School student in its reporting on his Jan. 18 encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial.
“NBCUniversal created a false narrative by portraying the ‘confrontation’ as a ‘hate crime’ committed by Nicholas,” said the complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
The lawsuit alleged that the teen was “an easy target for NBCUniversal to advance its anti-Trump agenda because he was a 16-year-old white, Catholic student who had attended the Right to Life March that day and was wearing a MAGA cap at the time of the incident which he had purchased earlier in the day as a souvenir.”
The latest lawsuit alleged that NBCUniversal, through its news outlets NBC and MSNBC, “unleashed its vast corporate wealth, influence, and power against Nicholas to falsely attack him despite the fact that at the time, he was a 16-year-old high school student.”
As you’ll recall, the moment some Twitter fool published a picture of Sandmann “smirking” at fake Vietnam Vet Phillips, with that red MAGA cap perched on his head, the game was on. Every mainstream media outlet (and to their shame, more than a few conservative sites) jumped on the bandwagon immediately. For the next 24 hours – at least – Sandmann was turned into the #1 villain in the United States. Without any fact-checking of their own, outlets like NBC parroted Phillips’ account of the situation, which involved the Covington Catholic boys shouting racist phrases, mocking the Native Americans, and blocking Phillips from peacefully approaching the Lincoln Memorial.
We can only guess how far this injustice might have gone were it not for the tiny inconvenience of videotaped evidence. But when that evidence emerged, it became immediately clear that the Catholic kids did nothing wrong, that Phillips was indeed the aggressor in the situation, and that Sandmann’s greatest crime was captured in that infamous photo: He smiled.
It’s hard to imagine that the fake news industry will top this one by the end of the year. It was a true low point in American “journalism.” We sincerely hope that Sandmann and his family take all of these news outlets to the cleaners. Maybe they’ll actually learn a lesson.
