Opinion

KLAVAN: The Covington Kids Versus The Media

   DailyWire.com

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” bestselling author Andrew Klavan discusses the massive lawsuit filed by the lawyer of one of the Covington Catholic High School students against The Washington Post. Transcript and video below.

Nick Sandmann and his lawyers have filed a $250 million dollar lawsuit against The Washington Post for defamation for the things they said. This Covington school kid, who was confronted by that supposed Native elder and was called all kinds of things. We were told that just wearing a MAGA hat was a bad thing, and that he had a smirk on his face that showed what a bigot he was. He was just absolutely slandered all over the press. His lawyers are promising this is just the first suit and there are more to come. And you know what happens usually is a lot of newspapers get away with saying stuff about people. The Supreme Court has basically decided that if you’re a famous person, or if you are somebody who has injected themselves into a big news story, then you can’t just say that they lied about you, you have to show that they lied about you maliciously, that they had a reason to really want to destroy you or to hurt you, that they didn’t just make a mistake – it’s very, very hard to prove.

Now personally I think Donald Trump can sue all these people and prove malice, but obviously, that’s not something we want people to do, we don’t want people suing newspapers because they attack the powerful. Even if they’re wrong, I mean even if their stories are just biased, like CNN or The New York Times or The Washington Post or ABC or NBC, or basically everybody. But still this is different, a lawyer for the Covington kids, Robert Barnes, explains the rules in this case:

Barnes: Because these are all private citizens and in many cases, minors and kids, the law is that saying anything false about them is libel and you don’t have a defense of actual malice, all you have to prove is negligence. So a lot of these journalists have been saying false statements about these kids, false statements about the kids there at the Lincoln Memorial, false statements about kids that were in various photographs related to the school and labeling the entire school. All you have to prove is that they were negligent in doing so, and by this point, in time it is clear that anyone who continues to lie and liable about these kids has done so illegally and can be sued for it.

They gave them a chance to apologize, which they didn’t do obviously, they’re gonna stand on their First Amendment rights.

So they are really going after the Post for being the Washington Post, “where democracy dies in slathering hatred of Donald Trump.” They’re basically saying this was part of the agenda but this guy is an innocent kid and he got caught in the crossfire while they were trying to take down the president. That’s a really interesting lawsuit.

Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here.

Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.

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