One of the worthwhile things about our country is our First Amendment rights, including freedom of the press.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I think that the mainstream legacy media is largely a propaganda machine with an anti-2A agenda.
But freedom of the press also allows people with an opposite viewpoint… like me… to be able to say that publicly, too.
What the news media is not allowed to do, though, is to make somebody look bad by accusing them of something that they didn’t do.
And, so, we find ourselves in a situation in which possibly the worlds most famous newspaper, the New York Times, lost their first defamation lawsuit in decades. Zachary Stieber writes,
A man whom The New York Times falsely reported was present during a fatal shooting in 2023 has won the first defamation case against the paper in more than 50 years.
Jurors on Aug. 20 ruled in favor of Kai Spears, who was a freshman at the University of Alabama at the time of the shooting. Spears sued the newspaper after it said he was inside a vehicle at a fatal shooting in Tuscaloosa, where the school is located, on Jan. 15, 2023.
Spears was not in the vehicle.
To give more detail about what happened, the New York Times took a quote from an anonymous source that turned out not to be true and, even after being notified that it wasn’t true, didn’t correct the story for months.
And, frankly, that’s probably the biggest reason that the Times was found guilty of defamation: they knew the truth and didn’t correct themselves.
Which, having seen numerous anti-2A stories from the Times over the years, doesn’t really surprise me.
Maybe they felt untouchable in court. Who knows?
What is clear is that they lost this case, and, maybe, they’ll finally face consequences for so arrogantly insisting that everything that they print is the truth… even when it clearly is not.
