NBC has settled a libel lawsuit against it by the Covington teenager, Nick Sandmann. NBC defamed Sandmann, a student at Covington Catholic High School, by making false factual claims about what Sandmann did in the course of being confronted by leftists at the 2019 March for Life. NBC made the claims in the course of falsely depicting Sandmann as a racist and falsely making Sandmann seem like the aggressor.
But paying the settlement probably won’t change NBC’s behavior, because falsely depicting people as racist draws more progressive viewers than balanced reporting does. And more viewers means more ad revenue, and lots more money for NBC. Just as tabloids keep peddling tabloid trash to draw readers, TV networks peddle inflammatory propaganda about racist conservatives to get progressives to watch TV.
As Jazz Shaw notes:
After receiving settlements in defamation lawsuits from CNN and the Washington Post, the teenager announced yesterday on Twitter that he had reached a settlement with NBC Universal along the same lines. The details of the settlement are confidential, but given the starting point in the negotiations, it was very likely a hefty sum….
When the entire mess began, it centered on a brief clip of Sandmann being screamed at by a Native American activist, along with a crowd of Black Hebrew Israelites who were hurling slurs and insults at him and his classmates. In response, all Sandmann did was smile, something that the press immediately dubbed “smirking.” But what really angered all of the talking heads in the liberal media was the fact that he was a white kid wearing a Make America Great Again hat. And that made him the enemy. But now, instead of “smirking,” Sandmann might want to allow himself the luxury of outright laughter, as in “having the last laugh”…
The media had lambasted the Covington Catholic High School student from Kentucky, now 19, over a confrontation at the 2019 March for Life in Washington, D.C….The original lawsuit against NBC Universal and MSNBC asked for $275 million. The final number was almost certainly far lower than that, but Sandmann’s attorneys never would have agreed to put the case to rest if it wasn’t a substantial amount of money…by agreeing to keep the terms confidential, NBC gets to continue pretending that they never really did anything wrong and were simply settling out of court to keep the costs down. You’ll notice that an apology to Nick for the outrageous treatment he received was not included as part of the settlement….
The real question is whether or not the mainstream media will have learned anything from all of this….Will these events in any way dull their collective kneejerk impulse to instantly create a narrative out of every public event in a way designed to support liberal ideology and denigrate or diminish anyone or anything they perceive as being associated with Donald Trump or the entire conservative movement?….Of course nothing is going to change. Even with the terrible ratings that outlets such as CNN and MSNBC have been turning in this year, the amount of money they probably had to hand over to Sandmann won’t be enough to significantly impact their bottom line. Selling outrage against conservative causes and creating works of fiction designed to paint their perceived adversaries as monsters is how they hang on to their core audiences and butter their bread. They’re not going to give up on it now.
