MSM 1, Sandmann 0

A federal judge has granted summary judgment to ABC, CBS, The New York Times, Gannett and Rolling Stone, rejecting libel claims by Nick Sandmann over an incident at the Lincoln Memorial that went viral in 2019. U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman wrote that the media outlets, in reporting on the incident, “were covering a matter of great public interest, and they reported Phillips’s first-person view of what he experienced. This would put the reader on notice that Phillips was simply giving his perspective on the incident.” Bertelsman wrote that “the Court concludes that Phillips’s statements that Sandmann ‘blocked’ him and ‘wouldn’t allow [him] to retreat’ are objectively unverifiable and thus unactionable opinions.”