A U.S. federal judge has ruled that a defamation lawsuit against NBC News and MSNBC can move to a jury trial. Judge Lisa Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia ruled that an OB-GYN could pursue his $30 million suit over the networks’ agenda-driven coverage of his behavior at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility.
In the fall of 2020, Dr. Mahendra Amin worked at an ICE facility in South Georgia. Both NBC News and MSNBC ran repeated reports based on a whistleblower’s claim that Amin performed “mass hysterectomies” on women and referred to the doctor as a “uterus collector.” Subsequent investigations proved that Amin only performed two hysterectomies at the facility, and he did both of them with the consent of the patients.
“An average viewer watching the three broadcasts would understand that Plaintiff was accused of performing mass hysterectomies that were unnecessary and without consent,” Wood wrote in her ruling, as the Washington Examiner reported.
“Multiple statements are verifiably false,” the judge added.
The Washington Examiner reports that someone in NBC’s standards department flagged the claims before the reports went live, and MSNBC hosts Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow expressed concerns over the veracity of the claims. Yet both networks ran the reports anyway.
Chris Scholl of NBC’s standards department concluded that the story “boils down to a single source — with an agenda — telling us things we have no basis to believe are true.”
The reports did plenty of damage to Amin’s reputation. If you search for him online, you’ll find plenty of other reports after 2020 besmirching his name, unsurprisingly from left-leaning outlets and organizations.
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DePauw University Professor Jeffrey McCall told the Washington Examiner that NBC News “should have been more rigorous in verifying” the claims before reporting them so forcefully. As a result, Amin has a strong case.
“NBC might well have been negligent in failing to confirm more fully the content of the whistleblower’s statement,” McCall explained. “It was also problematic that NBC repeated subjective and abstract language such as ‘mass hysterectomies.’”
McCall also said that much of the problem with the reports stemmed from the networks’ left-wing bias. If NBC and MSNBC hadn’t been so committed to reporting with an agenda, they could have avoided this trouble.
“It is also important that news organizations maintain staffs that have a broad range of viewpoints and perspectives,” he said. “Activist news outlets, such as NBC wants to consider itself these days, can suffer from groupthink, which short circuits thorough reporting and verification.”
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