The NYT lost an early attempt to dismiss a defamation suit against Project Veritas. This relates to Project Veritas's coverage of Omar and ballot harvesting. The judge ruled that Project Veritas had shown sufficient evidence that the NYT may have acted with "reckless disregard" and "actual malice".
The NYT's argument was that its news reporting was, in their words, “mere opinion incapable of being judged true or false". As Project Veritas pointed out, this contradicts NYT official policy, which expressly prohibits mixing subjective opinion in news articles. In essence, the NYT argued in court that their news reporting is not actually news (i.e. factual), and therefore cannot be treated as such.
In allowing the case to go ahead, the judge noted that...
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The Articles that are the subject of this action called the Video ‘deceptive,’ but the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel certainly apply to Astor’s and Hsu’s [NYT authors] failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles, as they now claim
It is unlikely that Project Veritas will ultimately prevail in the case, as the bar going forward is very high. That being said, the damage has largely been done from a Times point of view. Project Veritas does a decent job at laying out evidence that the Times piece was intentionally sloppy, motivated by bias, and that the authors actively decided against seeking out information which might have contradicted a preconceived narrative. The New York Times attempted to argue that Project Veritas was "libel proof" (i.e. their reputation is so bad that it is impossible to drive it any lower), which the judge also rejected.
One might hope that the NYT learns from this, suspends and/or censures the two authors, and then makes an active attempt to reestablish editorial control and credibility in their newsroom, but I think we all know that's unlikely to be the case.
Quick read.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/project-veritas-wins-early-round-in-defamation-lawsuit-against-new-york-times/The actual judgement.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20518694-order_denying_motion_to_dismiss