Project Veritas sues New York Times for calling group deceptive!

NEW YORK (PNN) - October 30, 2020 - Project Veritas, whose well-documented history of disseminating selectively edited or surreptitiously recorded videos has on a number of occasions landed its founder James O’Keefe in court, sued The New York Times on Friday. The plaintiff alleged that it was defamatory of the Times to call the group “deceptive”.

“The Times’ newsroom was incensed at what it viewed as Project Veritas stealing its thunder,” the outfit insisted in a 73-page complaint filed Friday in Westchester County Supreme Court.

The lawsuit takes aim at journalist Maggie Astor’s article in the Times on September 29 titled Project Veritas Video Was a Coordinated Disinformation Campaign, Researchers Say, reporting that Stanford University and the University of Washington researchers found that the group’s video accusing Congressman Ilhan Omar (Minn.) of voter fraud was a “concerted disinformation campaign”.

Researchers at those elite academic institutions reached the conclusions that the Times reported.

“The video made several falsifiable claims that have either been debunked by subsequent reporting or are without any factual support,” the report stated in its opening paragraph. “As the video calls into question the integrity of the election using misleading or inaccurate information, we determined this video to be a form of election disinformation.”

Project Veritas’s objections to the Times report began with the second word of the article: “deceptive”. The plaintiff noted that, later in the same sentence, the Times used the words “unidentified sources and with no verifiable evidence.” Stylistically, the group also took issue with the alleged “vitriolic disdain” the Times showed founder O’Keefe, who is described in the article as “little more than a conservative activist, not a bona fide journalist.”

After the Times story published, Project Veritas says it demanded a retraction and threatened a lawsuit if one was not granted.

The Times’ media reporter Tiffany Hsu then followed up the next month on October 25 in a story titled, Conservative News Sites Fuel Voter Fraud Misinformation. The article added Harvard’s heft to the chorus of academic experts warning about a pattern of amplifying false claims about mail-in ballots. Ivy League researchers called that pattern a “propaganda feedback loop”. The second Times article continued to describe Project Veritas’s video as “deceptive”.

Project Veritas leveled multiple defamation counts at the Times and their reporters, seeking what they call a “narrowly tailored injunction prohibiting the re-publication” of the articles, an apparent call for prior restraint of the press. They are represented by Scarsdale, New York-based lawyer Amy Bellantoni.