The Covington Kids’ Revenge, One Year Later | The American Conservative

Most agenda journalism victims are expected to disappear in shame. But this time it was different. Sandmann sued a range of journalists, including Maggie Haberman, Ana Navarro, and Shaun King, for slurs they threw at him on Twitter. Included in the swath of additional lawsuits by Sandmann were CNN, MSNBC s parent company, the AP, Gannett, HuffPo, Slate, and The Washington Post. In the words of the suit, they brought down the full force of corporate power, influence, and wealth on Nicholas by falsely attacking, vilifying, and bullying him despite the fact that he was a minor child.

The suits charged that journalists maintained a well-known and easily documented biased agenda against President Donald Trump and established a history of impugning individuals perceived to be supporters of the president. They asserted that CNN and the others would have known the statements to be untrue had they undertaken any reasonable efforts to verify their accuracy before publication. In other words, they should have committed journalism, the finding of facts, in lieu of packaging what was actually nothing at all into a steamy piece that fit an existing agenda.

Sandmann beat CNN (the other suits are pending), which settled and paid rather than risk a trial. Assuming credibility and self-respect are worth about zero, we now know that the price tag for the agenda journalism CNN practices is reportedly $25 million. That amount is probably half of what the network spends on botox for Anderson Cooper, but as Cooper s aestheticians are prone to say, it s a start.

via www.theamericanconservative.com

Now Sandman has to decide what to do with his life. But then we all do.