By Lucas Koerner, August 5, 2019
https://fair.org/home/npr-shreds-ethics-handbook-to-normalize-regime-change-in-venezuela/?awt_l=OLgaG&awt_m=hT9b2HUuKYR._TQ
Legal Kimchi? In a mostly unrelated matter — related only insofar as it also provides additional evidence (if such were needed) that NPR has deteriorated into a transparent propaganda tool of the Washington Establishment — NPR suffered a major loss on August 7. A federal judge affirmed a lower court decision to allow a lawsuit to proceed relating to the neuralgic issue of DNC employee Seth Rich, who was murdered on July 10, 2016 — and who so-called “conspiracy theorists” (like Ray) think played a role in the leak of DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
The day after the Court decision, NPR enlisted the help of discredited Yahoo! News pundit Michael Isikoff (author, with David Corn, of the fiction-posing-as-fact novel Russian Roulette), giving him 37 minutes on its popular Fresh Air program to spin yarn about how the Seth Rich story got started. You guessed it; it was the Russians. No, we are not making this up; see: https://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/
It the libel case against NPR, the judge ruled that NPR had stated as “verifiable statements of fact” information that could not be verified, and that the plaintiff had been, in effect, accused of being engaged in wrongdoing without persuasive sourcing language. (See: https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/ed-butowsky-57-million-case-against-nprs-seth-rich-conspiracy-coverage-moves-forward/ .)
Imagine, “persuasive sourcing” required to separate fact from opinion! What a terrible precedent, were it to be applied to the saga of Russia-gate.
Uh-Oh! Bigger Fish Could Be Fried in “Discovery”
The judge’s decision means the lawsuit can now proceed to the discovery stage, which will include demands for documents and depositions from the parties involved. So, we’ll have to wait to see if the Court will acquiesce to the usual Executive Branch objections that information regarding the murder of Seth Rich must be withheld as a state secret? Hmmm. What would THAT tell us?