“Nicholas Sandmann … has lost his defamation lawsuits against several media companies,” Insider reported on Friday, July 29, 2022 (story here).
“A federal judge struck the cases filed by Sandmann against The New York Times, CBS News, ABC News, NBC Universal Media, Rolling Stone, and Gannett,” Insider said, on the grounds the reporting his attorneys contend was defamatory consisted of “unactionable opinions.”
The case arose from a viral video appearing to show Sandmann, then a 16-year-old participant in an anti-abortion demonstration in Washington D.C., smirking at a Native American member of another demonstration (photo, left). A third group, not shown in the video, was inciting both groups and passersby. Wikipedia has a detailed account of the incident here.
Sandmann sued numerous news organizations for reporting the elder said Sandmann “blocked” him and “would not allow him to retreat.” The media reporting subsequently was criticized for not “fully investigating what occurred and … fueling controversy and outrage over the incident” (details here), but the judge characterized that as protected speech.
“The media defendants were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips’s first-person view of what he experienced,” his ruling said. “This would put the reader on notice that Phillips was simply giving his perspective on the incident.” Phillips, in fact, had injected himself into the middle of Sandmann’s group, and the failure to report Sandmann’s perspective was poor journalism, but one-sided reporting isn’t defamatory per se.
Libel suits against news organizations are very hard to win. Courts have deliberately made them so, in order to encourage the free flow of information. From the earliest days of our republic, a free press has been considered vital to preserving democracy.
Sandmann previously settled with CNN and Washington Post on undisclosed terms, which several legal experts said were almost certainly “nuisance settlements” (see article here). That is, the defendants paid a token amount to avoid a costly trial. Plaintiffs with strong cases normally don’t accept such settlements.
Immediately after the judge issued his ruling, he said he plans to appeal. That will cost a lot of money, and it’s not clear who would pay for it. But rightwing money might become available, if his case is viewed as a vehicle to get the Supreme Court to rewrite the New York Times v. Sullivan case (details here), which established a high bar for bringing defamation actions against news media.