According to local Fox affiliate, Fox 19, CNN agreed yesterday to settle a lawsuit brought by Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann.
Sandmann sought $275 million from CNN over its coverage of the confrontation he and his classmates had with an elderly Native American man while visiting Washington, D.C., on a school trip in January of last year.
The amount of the settlement was not made public during a hearing at the federal courthouse in Covington.
The suit read “CNN brought down the full force of its corporate power, influence, and wealth on Nicholas by falsely attacking, vilifying, and bullying him despite the fact that he was a minor child.”
Sandmann’s attorney, Todd V. McMurtry, vows to now turn their attention to NBC News, the Washington Post and others.
National Review points out that “the lawsuit filed by Sandmann’s attorneys in the Eastern District of Kentucky claimed that 53 statements included in CNN’s coverage of the incident were defamatory. One such statement, included in a CNN opinion piece, accused the students of acting with “racist disrespect” towards Phillips. Meanwhile, Bakari Sellers, a CNN contributor, publicly mused about assaulting the 16-year-old Sandmann, and HBO host Bill Maher called him a “little prick.””
As Reason.com notes:
“The media's collective condemnation of Sandmann and his classmates was deafening, but subsequent video footage showed that the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, had misrepresented the situation in his public statements to news outlets...
In any case, the Covington incident was a debacle for the media, and showed that the tendency of social media to inspire quick reactions is the Achilles' heel of journalism in the digital age."
The likely reason CNN settled: "the discovery process would have been horrifying for them."