Sometime today or tomorrow, CNN will get what the Washington Post got last month: a massive lawsuit from Nicholas Sandmann, whom the network repeatedly smeared after the now-notorious standoff with an Indian aggressor at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18.
Like the Post, CNN depicted Sandmann and his mates from Covington Catholic High as the bad guys in that morality play, staged as the boys awaited buses to take them home from the March for Life. Thus did the boy and his family suffer a vitriolic campaign of harassment and death threats. Even his bishop attacked him and his cohort.
The boy’s attorneys, Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry, filed a $250 million lawsuit in late February against the Post for its unconscionable smear.
CNN can expect its turn soon, likely before today is out, Wood told Fox talker Mark Levin.
And the dollar figure will be bigger.
January 18 — Military Faker Puts Out Fake News
The lawsuits arise from the verbal confrontation at the Memorial as the boys awaited buses to take them home to Kentucky from the March for Life. A group called the Black Hebrew Israelites treated the boys and passersby to a barrage of racial and other insults. The boys replied with high-school chants. Nothing dirty. Nothing racial. But the boys were white and Catholic. They wore MAGA hats.
Nathan Phillips, a “Native American elder” who until then pretended to be a “recon-ranger” and Vietnam veteran, approached the boys. The bedraggled Indian sage chanted gibberish and banged some sort of Indian drum.
A short video of the affair did its work.
CNN, the Post, and other media ran with a story that depicted the boys not just as the aggressors but as racist haters. Phillips repeatedly distorted the events in interviews, peddling a false narrative the media swallowed whole. Hollywood elites ate the buffalo chips, too.
After the obligatory Two Minutes Hate, the narrative quickly collapsed. Sandman’s attorneys released a video that exonerated him, a private detective agency’s report did likewise, and so Wood and McMurtry sued the Post, “which rushed to lead the mainstream media to assassinate Nicholas’s character and bully him” with a series of demonstrable falsehoods.
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Big Audience, Big Smear
Now, CNN will face the music, Wood told Levin. “CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than the Washington Post.” he said. And CNN, he said, reaches millions of American households.
CNN brags that it reaches about 89 million homes with its main network and headline news in the United States, as well as 890,000 hotel rooms. Worldwide, it reaches two billion people.
Wood said CNN “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 — saying things like that Nicholas was part of a group that was threatening the Black Hebrew Israelites, that they thought it was going to be a lynching.”
Sandman did nothing wrong he said, but CNN “couldn’t resist the idea that here’s a guy, a young boy, with a ‘Make America Great Again’ cap on. So they go after him.”
CNN’s people “woke up on Saturday morning and started throwing punches. The CNN folks were online on Twitter at 7 a.m., retweeting the little one-minute propaganda piece that had been put out by @2020fight.”
Wood vowed to find out who @2020fight is, and added that CNN was “out there right away going after this young boy. And they maintain it for at least two days.”
Wood accused the anti-Trump network of not doing its job. “Why didn’t they stop and just take an hour and look through the internet and find the truth and then report it?” he asked. “They were vicious. It was false.” Wood said he will likely file suit today.
As for the damages, Wood expects to hit CNN harder than the Post, which “was $50 million for the reputational damage, and … $200 million in punitive damages.”
The punitive damages will likely be “at least the same,” he said, “but the compensatory damage to Nicholas’s reputation, that number I expect will be higher.”
Wood hinted at the final figure with an ominous tweet: “CNN needs to write on the chalk board 275,000,000 times ‘We will never again falsely attack, vilify, or threaten a minor child.’”
