Ross: Washington Post didn’t act alone, social media helped
Feb 21, 2019, 8:10 AM
Attorneys for Nicholas Sandmann are now suing the Washington Post for defamation. Demanding $250 million because it posted that video showing Sandmann in his red Trump hat in a face-off with a Native American drummer at the Lincoln Memorial last month.
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The video made it look like a smug white kid was disrespecting a person of color. That is, until other videos came out showing that, if anything, it was the other way around.
But the Washington Post was far from alone. A Breitbart reporter assembled an impressive list of the online dominoes that spread the video before it got to The Post.
The video went from Instagram, to Reddit, to Twitter, to YouTube. It was re-posted by an activist clothing company, and by a Libyan American in Qatar. But here’s the critical factor – at every stage thousands of ordinary folks were liking it and re-tweeting it. And this was before The Post jumped in!
Of course newspapers should set a higher standard than ordinary folks. Except, the moment you re-tweet, or re-post, you’re not ordinary folks anymore. You’re a publisher.
The Washington Post has the deep pockets, that’s why it’s being sued. But if The Post is guilty of carelessly spreading this particular story, then so are the thousands of so-called ordinary folks who did, and still do, the exact same thing, again and again, day after day.
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