Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann is suing The Washington Post for its despicable and wholly, deliberately dishonest assault on the boy in its reporting on a confrontation initiated by an American Indian provocateur who also has a history of misrepresenting his role in the Vietnam War, a confrontation that was triggered by a group of blacks claiming to be Jewish and who were yelling racial slurs at Sandmann and his fellow students as the students waited for their bus ride back home.

The suit accuses WaPo of

using its vast financial resources to enter the bully pulpit by publishing a series of false and defamatory print and online articles…to smear a young boy who was in its view an acceptable casualty in their war against the president.

Any member of the NLMSM that delayed reporting of anything more than the fact of an encounter by a whole day in order to view the full video of the encounter would have known the facts and the truth.  WaPo made the carefully thought out editorial decision not to tarry that moment in order to gather actual facts on the matter.  Of course, the news outlet’s owners and editors could not know in real time that a dispositive video would be published, but those worthies did know, absolutely, that more facts would emerge, more facts could be brought to light by competent investigation.  The outlet chose not to bother.  It chose, instead, to attack children—leave aside its bias against a Republican President—for the sake of sensationalism, for clickbait, for readership.

My advice to Sandmann and the lawyers? Do not settle.  Get the court ruling.  Do not settle any appeals.  The suit is for harm and for $250 million.  Those $250 million needn’t only be for immediate damages, either; they can include significant punitive damages.

Burn the WaPo to the ground.  Its despicable assault on a child wants a serious answer, not a slap on the wrist. WaPo‘s abuse of a child wants an answer that not only gets the outlet’s attention (which to achieve that attention must consider the outlet’s deep pockets, via its owner), but one that also serves as a serious warning to the outlet’s peers in the NLMSM on the relative priorities between telling the cold facts and objective truth on the one hand and sensationalizing smears for the sake of clickbait on the other.