Over the weekend, Wood told Mark Levin, “CNN was probably more vicious in its direct attacks on Nicholas than The Washington Post.” That made it pretty clear that a lawsuit against the network was coming. Today, Nick Sandmann’s attorneys, L. Lin Wood and Todd McMurty have filed a second lawsuit stemming from the Covington affair. This one is aimed at CNN and it’s even bigger than the one previously filed against the Washington Post. From Fox News:
A lawsuit worth $275 million was filed against CNN on Tuesday over the network’s alleged “vicious” attack against Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann.
The lawsuit, filed just after 3 p.m. in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky, claims that CNN “elevated false, heinous accusations of racist conduct” against Sandmann and failed to adhere to “well-established journalistic standards and ethics.”
Sandmann’s co-counsel Todd McMurtry appeared on Fox’s The Story this afternoon and told guest host Sandra Smith, “”What CNN’s tagline is, is, ‘facts first,’ and what we believe their reporting was in this circumstance was, ‘lies first, cover up second, and facts not yet determined’ by that organization.” McMurty continued, “The difference between this lawsuit and the other lawsuit we have filed is that CNN is a very significant media organization with a much broader reach than say the Washington Post. It has Twitter followers of 41 million people. It published four videos [and] nine online articles that were tweeted out. So that’s millions and millions and millions of repetitions of the lies and falsehoods that CNN spread.”
When Smith pointed out that CNN first tweeted the brief video of Sandmann early in the morning, McMurty said, “Sending out a short snippet like that at 7 am after the event happens is totally irresponsible, completely negligent and, in our view, subject to punitive damages.” He added, “They did this without any reasonable investigation. They took something straight off Twitter that had been, in essence, manipulated so that it told one story and reported it as the truth.”
So what’s coming next. McMurty told Smith, “We plan to file a suit every few weeks or a month. We probably have ten, at least ten top targets in the media and individuals, some of whom were people involved in Twitter attacks.” Asked for specifics, he added, “Certainly we’re looking very closely at NBC. We’re looking very closely at AP. We’re looking very closely at HBO for the conduct of Bill Maher. We’re looking at some of the people who, like Kathy Griffin, who sent out these horrible tweets that are called doxxing.”
I’m not an attorney so I don’t know if Sandmann stands a chance of winning these suits at anywhere close to this level of damages, but even if a few of these organizations agree to settle he’s likely to be set for life even after the lawyers take their cut. Good for him. No one should become a whipping post for the entire world because a few leading outlets failed to check the tape before buying into the narrative. Here’s the interview with McMurty
