Jerry Falwell Jr. says he’s going to sue the New York Times over a story that claimed that he re-opened Liberty University despite their being coronavirus cases on campus.
Liberty University opened its campus back up and had ZERO cases of coronavirus! But that’s not what the New York Times printed. Liberty’s president @JerryFalwellJr describes why he had no choice but to SUE the NYT. pic.twitter.com/b4kQmjUtNW
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) May 15, 2020
Falwell says there were “absolutely zero” cases of student, faculty or the staff on campus. So that’s a problem for the New York Times. He has made this claim before, but he is now adding that he is going to sue the NYT:
In an interview on Starnes’ show, Falwell ripped a New York Times report that nearly a dozen students were experiencing symptoms of Covid-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. The Times cited “the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service,” who said three students so far had been tested for coronavirus, with at least one student, who lives off campus, testing positive.
More students were self-quarantining, the Times reported, a move caused, Falwell said, by where they had spent spring break. Falwell said the physician, who he says has “no official role at Liberty,” had “immediately issued a correction” to his statements to the Times.
A statement on the school’s website says the physician denies “he ever told the reporter that Liberty had about a dozen students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19” and that he “gave figures for testing and self-isolation that are consistent with Liberty’s numbers but the New York Times preferred to go forward with sensational click-bait that increases traffic.”
That was in Politico from early April – when he claimed that two reporters were going to be arrested for trespassing too. It doesn’t seem like much came of that claim:
David McCraw, in-house counsel for the Times, said in a statement, “Julia was engaged in the most routine form of news gathering: taking an outdoors picture of a person who was interviewed for a news story.” McCraw said Rendleman had been invited to campus by one of the students interviewed for the article.
“We are disappointed that Liberty University would decide to make that into a criminal case and go after a freelance journalist because its officials were unhappy with press coverage of the university’s decision to convene classes in the midst of the pandemic,” he added.
There is no warrant for the author of the Times article, Elizabeth Williamson, because the magistrate judge did not find enough physical evidence to charge her, Falwell said. But he threatened civil defamation lawsuits against Williamson and another unidentified media outlet if the Times didn’t make a “clear apologetic correction” to its report.
So I’m not sure what is going on, to be honest.