Last September, Project Veritas released a video that suggested there has been substantial voter fraud in Minnesota elections, particularly in the Somali community, and linked that fraud to Ilhan Omar’s machine. The New York Times then published a series of articles that smeared Veritas and its video as a “coordinated disinformation campaign,” alleging that the video was “deceptive” and “false.” Project Veritas sued the Times in state court in New York, and the Times moved to dismiss the lawsuit for failure to state a claim.
On Thursday, the presiding judge denied the Times’s motion to dismiss in an opinion you can read here. Denial of the motion to dismiss does not mean that Veritas will ultimately win the case, obviously, but it means that Veritas will be able to proceed with discovery and try to prove that the newspaper’s reporters and editors acted with “actual malice.” That means they knew their stories were false, or realized they were likely false, and printed them anyway.
The court’s opinion is notable in part for what it tells us about the Times’s defenses. The Times now argues that when it said the Veritas video was “deceptive,” “false,” and part of a “coordinated disinformation campaign,” those were mere statements of opinion, not fact, even though they appeared in news reports. Judge Wood comments:
Defendants argue that their statements describing Veritas’ Video as “deceptive,” “false,” and “without evidence” were mere opinion incapable of being judged true or false. However, if a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion.
***
Stating that the video is “deceptive” and stating “without verifiable evidence” in a factual way in a news article certainly presents the statement as fact, not opinion.
I also find it ironic that the Times, whose news section consists largely of narratives based on leaks by anonymous sources, now criticizes Project Veritas because its video allegedly relies on “unidentified sources.”.........To Read More....
- New York Times Writers May Have Deceived Readers in Stories About Project Veritas: Court
- James O’Keefe: Project Veritas Going on the Offense With Lawsuits
No comments:
Post a Comment