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MAGA brats mock Native American with "build the wall" chants

Emily's Cat said:
Why would it not have had much chance of success? I'm not sure I'm following.
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Suing a news organization for a false story is always an uphill climb in the US.

In the first go-around, all 33 claims of Sandmann's suit were dismissed, and only 3 were saved on appeal because the judge admitted there was a possibility that evidence could exist to substantiate them.

Sandmann may have been defamed, but probably by the man at the rally who spun the BS story, not the newspapers who reported it uncritically. Unless there is evidence showing that these agencies knew it was a false story and ran it maliciously, 1A protections are very broad.

Consider the Alex Jones case, which is also a long shot. You can be a lousy "journalist" and still have very broad speech protections in this country.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
I think Sandmann has a legitimate grievance against these companies. I just wonder if he realized that much of the interest in his case was about a conflict much bigger than his personal calamity. I hope he was, at least, a willing pawn in the larger culture war, and not just some sucker.
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I'm a lot more inclined to view him as a victim in this than as wither a pawn or a sucker.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I'm a lot more inclined to view him as a victim in this than as wither a pawn or a sucker.
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The people that are supporting his attacks on WaPo and others have an axe to grind that goes well beyond bad reporting about the Covington case.

That's my point. They don't really care about Sandmann beyond seeing his bad experience as an avenue of attack against their political enemies. His best interests aren't really the motivating concern for the culture warriors. I hope that he was at least aware of that and a willing participant.
 
Emily's Cat said:
I'm a lot more inclined to view him as a victim in this than as wither a pawn or a sucker.
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That doesn't fit the narrative of those who want to see him as an evil person who got what he deserved because he was white and wore a MAGA hat.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
The people that are supporting his attacks on WaPo and others have an axe to grind that goes well beyond bad reporting about the Covington case.

That's my point. They don't really care about Sandmann beyond seeing his bad experience as an avenue of attack against their political enemies. His best interests aren't really the motivating concern for the culture warriors. I hope that he was at least aware of that and a willing participant.
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Wow! You appear to be projecting your own way of thinking onto your political foes. Not a good look to be sure.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
The people that are supporting his attacks on WaPo and others have an axe to grind that goes well beyond bad reporting about the Covington case.

That's my point. They don't really care about Sandmann beyond seeing his bad experience as an avenue of attack against their political enemies. His best interests aren't really the motivating concern for the culture warriors. I hope that he was at least aware of that and a willing participant.
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Very true.

ETA: Well, let me pull that back a bit.

It isn't about Sandmann. It's about Sandmann and a bunch of others like him. It's about bad journalism in general. It's about journalism that goes for clickbait stories without corroboration. Yes, WaPo is in that category these days.

so, the people attacking WaPo on this story are not specifically attacking them because they (we?) feel bad about one high school kid from Kentucky, or one kid from Kentucky and his classmates. It's about bad journalism in general that seems to frame everything in political terms and seems willing to throw people to the wolves in order to get eyeballs on their story, and typically does it all with a view toward a political slant that will appeal to their audience.

Nick Sandmann was nothing to the Washington Post. They didn't care about him as a person. However, as a symbol, they liked the Maga-hat wearing kid whose picture was taken at a moment where a story could be spun around it. They fit their narrative onto the picture, and threw out the people in the process. "Maga brats mock Native American" makes a good story that their readers would eat up. The fact that it was false is not something really important
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Note: That's not the article title. It's the thread title. In other words, it is one reader's translation of the mainstream coverage of this event.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
The people that are supporting his attacks on WaPo and others have an axe to grind that goes well beyond bad reporting about the Covington case.

That's my point. They don't really care about Sandmann beyond seeing his bad experience as an avenue of attack against their political enemies. His best interests aren't really the motivating concern for the culture warriors. I hope that he was at least aware of that and a willing participant.
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It's balanced out by the fact that WaPo et al. don't really care about Sandmann beyond seeing his bad experience as an avenue of attack against their political enemies. His best interests aren't really the motivating concern for the mainstream media and their allies in the culture wars. I hope that you are at least aware of this and a willing participant.
 
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theprestige said:
It's balanced out by the fact that WaPo et al. don't really care about Sandmann beyond seeing his bad experience as an avenue of attack against their political enemies.

Your concern is as absurd as it is misplaced.
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That's a better way of saying what I was trying to say.

However, I would say that at least some of the media that attacked Sandmann wasn't genuinely seeing him and his classmates as a way of attacking political enemies. That would imply sincerity on their behalf. I think it's equally likely that they really don't care, as long as they get advertising revenue, but they've decided that slanted stories like this one play well to their readership, and result in lots of clicks.

So, some of them have political bias that reflects that of the editors and/or employees, while some of them have just noticed that bias works to draw in viewers. I can't tell which outlets are which, and I'm sure there's a mix within the outlets themselves.

I have a very cynical view of the media these days, but it seems to fit what I see.
 
Meadmaker said:
Very true.

ETA: Well, let me pull that back a bit.

It isn't about Sandmann. It's about Sandmann and a bunch of others like him. It's about bad journalism in general. It's about journalism that goes for clickbait stories without corroboration. Yes, WaPo is in that category these days.

so, the people attacking WaPo on this story are not specifically attacking them because they (we?) feel bad about one high school kid from Kentucky, or one kid from Kentucky and his classmates. It's about bad journalism in general that seems to frame everything in political terms and seems willing to throw people to the wolves in order to get eyeballs on their story, and typically does it all with a view toward a political slant that will appeal to their audience.

Nick Sandmann was nothing to the Washington Post. They didn't care about him as a person. However, as a symbol, they liked the Maga-hat wearing kid whose picture was taken at a moment where a story could be spun around it. They fit their narrative onto the picture, and threw out the people in the process. "Maga brats mock Native American" makes a good story that their readers would eat up. The fact that it was false is not something really important
.
Note: That's not the article title. It's the thread title. In other words, it is one reader's translation of the mainstream coverage of this event.
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This whole episode has been rightly embarrassing for respected institutions like WaPo or NYTimes. Clearly a failure of their standards for them to go running blind after some salacious story. The egg on their face is rightly deserved, though I don't think the litigation did much to twist the knife. It still seems very likely that this "settlement" was not a significant blow and, from a strictly financial/legal perspective, Sandmann's litigation failed.

As far as the cable outlets, nobody really expects much of them anyway. 24hr cable news is garbage pretty much across the board, so I'm not at all surprised they botched the story. Are they even capable of shame?

If Sandmann and the other Covington kids got their legal representation pro-bono or on contingency, I'd say they they probably did ok. If they paid any of their own money for this PR stunt litigation, they got fleeced in service to the broader culture war.
 
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An example of why it is not good to jump to conclusions?

Emily's Cat said:
And FWIW, I still run across people out in interwebsland who firmly believe that Sandmann and his fellow students deserved the doxxing and death threats and mistreatment they received because... I don't know. Because they had on trump hats? Because they were white? Because they were initially painted as evil-doers and people are loathe to change their minds? It makes no sense to me, but I regularly run across people who will still claim that he deserved the treatment that he got and that him winning the suits is a travesty.
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I was thinking about using this incident in a Facebook discussion as a good example why one should not jump to conclusions (especially with respect to doxxing). However, if some people have yet to jump back, I guess that I won't bother.
 
Emily's Cat said:
And FWIW, I still run across people out in interwebsland who firmly believe that Sandmann and his fellow students deserved the doxxing and death threats and mistreatment they received because... I don't know. Because they had on trump hats?
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Well, yes. That's exactly why. People in this thread gave that very justification.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
If Sandmann and the other Covington kids got their legal representation pro-bono or on contingency, I'd say they they probably did ok. If they paid any of their own money for this PR stunt litigation, they got fleeced in service to the broader culture war.
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I would assume that it was provided on contingency, by lawyers salivating at getting a piece of the pie.

Once again, though, that's an assumption.
 
Speaking of John McWhorter, he did a pretty good job of calling this one early on his podcast at a time when almost everyone thought there was at least more truth to the story than there turned out to be.

He said he saw that particular photo of Sandmann wearing the MAGA hat and noticed the smirk on his face. He said he immediately just knew that it was a photo selected from a very particular point in time to suggest a certain context and that it was all bogus.
 
Meadmaker said:
I would assume that it was provided on contingency, by lawyers salivating at getting a piece of the pie.

Once again, though, that's an assumption.
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Sure, but it's also the most likely scenario. There certainly would have been lawyers willing to take it on contingency, and since the defendants have deep enough pockets to collect on, that's really the best setup for the plaintiff.
 
unconventional

Nicholas Sandmann will speak at the Republican convention. I was sympathetic to Mr. Sandmann, given that there was a rush to judgment concerning Covington Catholic, but everything has its limits.
 
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