Covington High School Issue

[Belsnickel]

(01-24-2019, 11:49 PM)BFritz21 Wrote: Every news station that ran the report before anyone could really see what happened and only ran parts of the report to make the kids look like assholes.

Defamation of character isn't enough?  

Ok, all of the death threats the kid and his family received because of the false propaganda that the media ran with.

By the way, to all the people saying that the kid should have moved, the word is that the NA was walking around, made direct eye contact with the kid, and then proceeded to walk up and beat his drum inches from his face.

(01-25-2019, 01:33 AM)Benton Wrote: https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/public-and-broadcasting#DISTORTION



It's difficult to prove intentional distortion of news. Just look at this story. There's very, very different opinions, interpretations and even admittance of what happened.

That's FCC regulations, of course, and not a civil suit. But from my experience with a half dozen libel/slander suits, a suit here would likely not be successful. Especially given that while there may only be a few doing this act or a few saying something, in a court there's still the issue that some were saying it or doing it. For example, everyone in the video (or even the majority) may not be doing a tomahawk, but if multiple students are, it's not incorrect to say "students were doing the tomahawk." 

This was what I was going to get at. The proof would have to point to the media groups knowing that what they were reporting was incorrect and doing it anyway in order for their to be a libel case to make. Jumping the conclusions doesn't do it. They reported based on what they knew at the time. Any libel case against a news agency would be a losing battle for the plaintiff for this.