COVINGTON, Ky. (FOX19) – CNN agreed Tuesday to settle a lawsuit with Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann.
The amount of the settlement was not made public during a hearing at the federal courthouse in Covington, Kentucky.
Sandmann’s lawsuit sought $800 million from CNN, the Washington Post and NBC Universal.
(Featured image is “Random pics 005” by How I See Life. Used under a creative commons license.)
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If you want to see where we discussed the events as they happened, we discussed them here.Report
96 percent of cases end in settlement. This does not necessarily mean fault. It can be a simple cost of benefit analysis and often is. I.e. Suppose I tell my client “I don’t think you are liable but it will cost me 150K to prove that but I can get the case dismissed for 35K-50K in settlement.” Many people choose to settle especially insurance companies.* But no one pays attention to this and people will see this as vindication for kid.
*I wonder if CNN does have insurance for libel/defamation cases.Report
But no one pays attention to this and people will see this as vindication for kid.
Does CNN know that no one pays attention to this and that folks will see this as vindication for the kid?
If they do, how much would that knowledge *NOT* getting out be worth to them?
And then, I guess, they settled for less than that number.Report
Hard to feel bad for CNN here. They didn’t actually do their work and got burned. Frankly I wish more media outlets suffered consequences for bad journalism of any variety.Report
What is your evidence that CNN was wrong besides the complaint, bias, and settlement?Report
My question as well.
“Attorneys say the money they’re seeking is not designed to compensate Nick, but to “deter the defendants” from doing the same thing (that they’re accused of) in the future.”
What was it they were accused of doing?Report
The full 2 hour video showing that the incident was instigated by the Native American protester and Black Israelites.Report
Seriously, all I ever saw was the kid standing in front of the man who, the article notes, they are suing for 5 million dollars.
What else happened?Report
Handful of things.
Report
Well, If Reza Aslan said something like that about me, I would sue CNN also. Maybe Fox too, but definitely CNN.Report
He was working for CNN at the time (heck, he might be working there now, I’m not keeping up).Report
OK, suing networks when their employees say hateful things about private citizens is fair.Report
The court dates for the WaPo and NBC haven’t yet taken place.Report
I assume their employees said equally hateful things.Report
There were multiple different protest groups with wildly different agendas. The kids were there for a pro-Life demo and behaved themselves. The “confrontation” was largely a “you can see whatever you want to” Rorschach test. The adults, including the media, handled themselves poorly.
Effectively the media saw “MAGA hat” and presented that as “racist scum attacking a Native American for being a Native American” which predictably led to things like death threats and threats from the kids’ school of expulsion.
There’s an argument some of what the media represented was clearly wrong, designed to enflame, and went past opinion “The judge stood by his earlier decision that 30 of the Post’s 33 statements targeted by the complaint were not libelous, but agreed that a further review was required for three statements that “state that (Sandmann) ‘blocked’ Nathan Phillips and ‘would not allow him to retreat'”.[125]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memorial_confrontationReport
The impact at CNN is almost certainly small. They’re owned by WarnerMedia, which is owned by AT&T. At some level there’s a broadcasters liability policy, and whoever wrote that “retail” policy probably has reinsurance.
(My dad worked at National Indemnity for years. He would bring home stories from the underwriters about setting rates on bizarre risks.)Report
It obviously isn’t going to run them out of business or anything remotely close to that. Never said it should. All I said is I think a consequence here is the right outcome.Report
I heartily predict people cheering this settlement will not be as enthusiastic when it is applied on at least some other people. I dont’ know whether the settlement is wrong or right, but is ain’t gonna go down smooth in other cases.Report
We already got a preview of this sort of thing earlier with the Gibson’s Bakery lawsuit.Report
I assume Alex Jones must be sweating. Well sweating and swearing even more then usual if that is possible. I wonder what the Comet Pizza people are doing now. Does Greta Thunberg need some Euros. How much is it worth to be called a traitor on network tv by a fox news host or rush.
If i had a serious prediction i would say there will very few actual lawsuits re: this kind of thing. But every time questions are raised about it as compared to some other news incident the response will fall most on partisan lines. Very much the people cheering for the sandman wont’ be cheering if it was rush or fox or maybe even jones.
Should i just assume we all agree jones should be sued until he broke twice over?Report
I was thinking more about the estate of “Dr. Tiller The Baby Killer”.Report
Yeah. Shirley Sherrod and almost everyone james okeefe has filmed. Though he did lose one case i believe, i’m not sure what grounds that was on. What about all the networks that broadcast his sleaze. They amplified it and played it endlessly.Report
Pretty simple distinction dude- they reported false facts (not the same as spurious opinions) to the public and caused reputational damage. It’s text book libel. No threat to NYT v. Sullivan.Report
Well, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” seems like an entirely debatable opinion.Report
The fact at issue was the portrayal of Sandmann as part of a vicious mob that assaulted and racially taunted the Native American activist and Black Israelites.
I concede that whether his face is punchable is a matter of opinion, but tweets like that do go a pretty long way towards supporting reputational damage.Report
So alex jones should be paying millions and So should those who aired okeefe vids and okeefe himself. There was outright lying and reporting of false facts.Report
Acorn did sue O’Keefe but IIRC ultimately didn’t really pursue the complaint zealously. Not sure why that was but that’s on them.
I don’t know enough about Alex Jones to comment on him.Report
Jones spent years claiming the sandy hook school shooting was a hoax. People harassed the parents of the murdered children claiming they were lying and scamming. Jones pushed all that. Viscerally i want jones to fry and i dont’ know the specific legal issues. But if sandman got money for his deal, then jomes should be paying every dollar he has ever or will ever earn.Report
I mean, if there’s a bona fide legal theory there I don’t care if someone pursues it. Again, I don’t know enough about him, but if he’s just saying the event didn’t happen that wouldn’t rise to libel. The statement has to be about the plaintiff (and maybe he has made false statements about them, I admit to total ignorance).Report
Do we know that CNN had the full video when they initially issued their “report”?
You are applying wildly different standards here dude while pretending that you’re doing the exact opposite.Report
No I’m not, I’m just telling you the Sandmann claim was/is a pretty normal libel suit. But the thing about those is you actually have to go sue to recover.
I don’t know anything about Alex Jones other than what greg said on this thread (which I’m sure is accurate, being serious no sarcasm intended) but I’m not drawing any conclusions about him or the merits of any libel cases against him.Report
He has gone up to the batshit lunacy of accusing some of the parents of being crisis actors. Those are people paid by the gov to pretend they are victims of tragedies or disasters to perpetuate a hoax such as a massacre of school children. As one does.Report
But Greginak you gotta understand, Jones is owning the libs and antifa and that is really what matters now in the land. He is owning the libs and Trumpite-lites of the Quillette Brigade love that so.
More seriously, he is being uncooperative. I saw he was just sanctioned 100,000 for not compling with discovery.Report
I heard about the fine. Amazing. Clients get the lawyers they deserve. Lawyers who take on raving scumbags get the ulcers they earn.*
* This mostly applies in richpeople/ celebrity civil law.Report
“We already got a preview of this sort of thing earlier with the Gibson’s Bakery lawsuit.”
I think our discussion of that happened in this post.Report
Ah, yes. So many memories.
Once upon a time, I remember getting into arguments about “Loser Pays” and how we should use that more often than we do. The counter-arguments usually took the form “not every case is a slam dunk, normal people should have access to the justice system without having to worry about not only losing but also paying for IBM’s lawyers” or something like that.
Have we recently moved to a system that uses “Loser Pays” more often?
Or is this case so egregious that it’s one of the minuscule “Loser Pays” outcomes in its own right?Report
Courts can award attorneys’ fees, and some jurisdictions have statutes awarding damages to defendants in certain egregious situations where lawfare is used to bully or censor people (anti-SLAPP laws for example).
I think these are more situations where planet intersectionality has been caught making false assertions of fact about individuals and then kicked in the backside by the unfortunate existence of verifiable reality.Report
Nick has released a statement:
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immediately pouncing, like all Republicans doReport
A theory about the settlement:
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That may explain why both sides settled.Report
Now to see what happens with the WaPo and NBC. Given that Nick folded/caved so quickly here, I wonder if one of them will have the fortitude to show the world, and the jury, exactly what he was trying to hide.Report
The cost to CNN of defending this lawsuit, even successfully, would have been in the low seven figures. Unless and until we get useful information about how much CNN paid, all the theorizing about what the settlement “means” is just spitballing. Not that that will stop anybody.Report
There was an NDA.
If there is a point at which we learn the amount, it’ll be waaaaaaaay down in the future.
(Wait, does CNN make its taxes public? It should!)Report
True, so the question is whether to spitball forever — or at least for a long time — or not.Report
Dude, this happened yesterday.
If we’re talking about this between, oh, Saturday and the trial/settlement of NBC or WaPo, I’ll be shocked.Report