The Daily - Putting “Fake News” on Trial

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

The families of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 are suing a conspiracy theorist who claims the massacre was a hoax. Their lawsuits are bringing the issue of “fake news” to the courts. Guest: Elizabeth Williamson, a reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the families of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School are suing a conspiracy theorist who claims the massacre was a hoax. How their lawsuit is putting fake news on trial. It's Thursday, May 24th. We were just in the middle of the gym when we heard some gunshots, and then everybody started kind of panicking. Then we had to climb into the closets, and we heard a lot more gunshots, and the ambulance came. But then the policeman directed us to run out of the building and go to the fire department.

A look in Newtown, Connecticut, at an elementary school, Sandy Hook Elementary, where NBC News says that 18 children, eight adults, plus the gunman, have been killed. Any minute, we expect the police will release the names of the victims as this community begins to process the unimaginable horror of students lost at school. It was the worst school shooting

in American history at that time. The majority of those who died today were children. Beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. The children were so young. The killing was so horrible and so sudden. Even the president struggled to compose himself when he spoke about it. They had their entire lives ahead of them. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.

There was a sense that a killing this awful of children so young in such a cold-blooded way was hard to believe. Elizabeth Williamson is a reporter in the Washington Bureau. And that disbelief for most Americans took on the form of just extreme grief and horror. But for a group of people who, you know, 20 years ago might have been extremely isolated, these folks gathered online and they began trading bizarre theories over what this event might really have been. All I know is the official story of Sandy Hook has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. And so all these various strands of rumor, of innuendo, of supposition began to gather on this website run by a guy named Alex Jones. Over 20 years ago, Alex Jones created the media platform called InfoWars. And in the decades since, it's grown into a truly remarkable institution with over 200

radio affiliates. InfoWars is several things. It's a radio show. It's a website. And it's a YouTube video channel whose videos have been viewed a combined more than one billion times. We know there is a cover-up taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada concerning the tragic massacre

of October 1st, 2017 that left 59 people dead and hundreds of others. He has often had the suspicion that major events in our history have had shadowy forces operating behind the scenes. Building 7, 47 stories, had already fallen into its own footprint before it even happened. And then it happened. 9-11, for example, was an inside job. Let me explain something. McVeigh was a patsy. That was a staged event.

The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was staged by the government. McVeigh basically thought they were just doing a drill and we're going to set up white supremacists at Elohim City. When he found out they were going to go operational, just like Ahmad Salam that we've had on. Often his theories center on mass shootings or mass tragic events. You saw him stage Fast and Furious. Folks, they staged Aurora. They staged Sandy Hook. The evidence is just overwhelming.

And at the end of virtually every InfoWars video or broadcast, there's a pitch. We have super male vitality and super female vitality, which are amazing concentrated herbals that are just so good for the endocrine system, the body, you name it, 50% off. It's for a vitamin supplement. It's for some kind of survivalist gear. Pollen block is amazing. We're specially fed quail, Japanese quail in France. It just has these chemicals that are naturally occurring

that really help with all the allergies and stuff. It just has these chemicals that are naturally occurring that really help with all the allergies and stuff. And these products also appeal to the sense that this is a nation under siege, the sense that these listeners and viewers have that they need to protect themselves against some shadowy forces out there determined to deprive them of their freedom or of their rights. Sandy Hook is a synthetic, completely fake, with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn't believe it. So in the days and months after Sandy Hook, Alex Jones and Infowars become the receptacle for every bizarre theory, every supposition, every suspicion about the nature of this event. Now, I'm just going to hit a few of the big unanswered questions of Sandy Hook. Just a few. We've got people clearly coming up and laughing and then doing the fake crying. No emergency helicopters were sent. Clearly got people where it's actors playing different parts

of different people, the building bulldoze, covering up everything. I've looked at it, and undoubtedly there's a cover-up, there's actors, they're manipulating, they've been caught lying, and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it. And why, as best we can tell, does Alex Jones pick up and run with this conspiratorial theory about Sandy Hook? Why this subject? I think the simplest reason is it got an enormous amount of attention. Something this horrific

generated a lot of emotion in the country. So some people went to InfoWars simply because they were grappling with a way to understand an event of this magnitude, something this horrible. They wanted to know, you know, did this really happen? How could this have happened in our country? But at the same time, there were people who, you know, InfoWars is a conservative website, and there were people congregating there who were really concerned that this was going to be used as an excuse to deprive them

of their Second Amendment rights and to confiscate their firearms. The Newtown kids, oh, they take them, put them in our face, tell us their names, who they were. I heard an ad this morning on the radio, Bloomberg paid for it locally, going, I dropped Billy off and watched him go around the corner. And he never came back, all because of the guns. Won't you just turn your guns in for my son why'd you do it to him gun owners well listen i didn't kill your kids he started to articulate over time an overall theory of the case that sandy hook was a government-sponsored event staged by what he called gun grabbers.

That a tragedy of this magnitude surely couldn't have occurred on its own. It couldn't have been that random thing. It had to have been orchestrated by a government, by a president determined to limit Americans' Second Amendment freedoms. Just tell us why the people are walking in circles in and out of the building. It appears to be staged. Tell us why they said they didn't catch somebody in the woods when they did. Tell us why the school was closed before and then after, why they've sealed it all, why they've now torn it down. What he wanted to do was to inspire people to investigate this.

His M.O. was always, well, we need to take a look at this. We need to understand this better. This isn't what they are telling us it really is. Great job to all the people out there, the crowdsourcing that are researching all these clips. And so his listeners began to fan out and see what they could find. They looked at the news footage. They looked at videos that people had taken. They looked at media coverage of the event and they began to target the people who were involved, and that included the parents. Wolfgang, thank you for joining us.

Thanks a lot, Alex, and thank God you have a voice. I'm glad InfoWars is out there. So in the days and months following the shootings, They need to get ready, Alex. We're coming. people who were devotees of InfoWars were seen in Newtown. They were videotaping the scene with their cell phones. They were visiting the makeshift memorials to the children, the piles of flowers. They were filming the parents as they went about their business. They began to approach some of them on the street,

and they began to ask for proof that this had actually happened. And they were asking for proof from the parents themselves. That's kind of an unbelievable request. The questions I ask are not offensive to any parent who lost a child that day. They're not offensive to the Connecticut State Police. They're not offensive to anyone. They're such simple questions. Why no trauma helicopters?

Why would you not let paramedics? These are your children. And you wouldn't let paramedics and EMTs into the building? You got 27 children declared dead within eight minutes? Who does this? Who is so great at that job? in eight minutes? Who does this? Who is so great at that job? Over time, this went from being a kind of misguided and strange effort to discover the, quote, real truth behind this event to something more sinister. Ladies and gentlemen, you are the board member. You are the leaders of this community.

You are the superintendent. Respond. It began to evolve into a kind of demand for proof and a demand for people to identify themselves as actors or show us that you actually lost family members in this event. So this could have all dissipated over time. People would have moved on to the next thing. It could have stayed in the dark corners of the Internet. And indeed, that's what the Sandy Hook families were praying and hoping for. But instead, Donald Trump is our guest, ladies and gentlemen, for the next 30 minutes or so.

Alex Jones and InfoWars got an enormous boost during the presidential campaign when Donald Trump appeared on his radio show. I just want to finish by saying your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope. And I think we'll be speaking a lot, but you'll be you'll be looking at me in a year, in a year or two years. Let's give me a little bit of a time to run things. But a year into office, you'll be saying, wow, I remember that interview. He said he was going to do it and he did a great job. You'll be very proud of our country. Well, I'm impressed. I mean, you're saying you're fully committed. You know, there's no future if we don't take this country back. Donald Trump, I hope you can help uncripple America. Thank you

so much, sir, that you will be attacked for coming on. And we know you know that. Thank you. Thank you very much. His following exploded. Thank you. Thank you very much. His following exploded. He even said, and this really just is so disgusting. He even said the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were child actors and no one was actually killed there. I don't know what happens in somebody's mind or how dark their heart must be to say things like that. And every time that Alex Jones got attention, more people went to his website and more people started to talk about Sandy Hook to the point where the parents of the

victims were noticing that when he was mentioned during the campaign, the threats to them increased. There was one family of a little boy, six years old, who was killed. They lived in the Newtown area. They were hounded by people who would videotape them and approach them when they visited the memorials to their son. There were death threats left on a website they created in part to commemorate their son's memory. The family eventually ended up moving. They moved to a gated community with 24-hour surveillance, and every night before they go to bed, to this day, they go around the house and they check the windows and doors to make sure they're locked, to show their children that they're locked.

And their kids sleep with the lights on. So this family has been driven from its home after already suffering the trauma of losing a child. Because fans of Infowars, Alex Jones, people who have begun to subscribe to this demonstrably false theory, are publicly harassing them. Yes. And so then they turn to the legal system. Infowars owner and host Alex Jones is being sued by the parents of two children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in 2012. Jones had said the shooting was fake and staged by the U.S. government. So in April, the families of two Sandy Hook victims filed lawsuits for defamation against Alex Jones and Infowars.

More families of victims in the Sandy Hook shooting are suing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Six families and an FBI agent filed that defamation lawsuit in court today. And on Wednesday, they were joined by the families of six more victims. And what is the parents' legal argument here? What is it that they're claiming in these lawsuits? So they're claiming that they've essentially been called liars, that they've been accused of staging their own children's death as part of some broader plot. And they're further maintaining that the First Amendment,

which covers freedom of speech, does not apply to falsehoods peddled for money by someone who knows that the things they're circulating and spreading are not true. And what is Alex Jones arguing in response to that? So Alex Jones claims First Amendment protection for what he says and does. He maintains that this is a patriotic activity. As an American, you should be questioning your government. You should be questioning things that go on in your country. And that people who are doing this kind of thing and believing these theories are people who are at the vanguard of American tradition. So is this basically a First Amendment showdown?

Yes, it is. The test that he faces is if this is opinion, if he honestly believes that these theories are true, he is protected. If he hasn't investigated the facts or if he's willfully and recklessly ignoring the existence of these facts, he's in trouble. So what the families are pointing to is the fact that Alex Jones has wavered over time. His beliefs appear to have shapeshifted somewhat. On his website, you'll see a statement in which he says, I never believed that these kids didn't die. My heart goes out to the parents. On the same website, you'll find another video that says, I've seen soap operas before and I know actors when I see them. So in their interpretation, it's a kind of dog whistle that every time he spreads this idea that Sandy Hook was a hoax, he gets more listeners, more followers, he sells more vitamin supplements, more survivalist gear, more t-shirts, more subscriptions. It's all about the clicks and the money. about the clicks and the money.

So just to be clear, if Jones was a true believer in the Sandy Hook hoax, this argument that this was manufactured, if that was his actual, deeply held opinion, he would have a better chance of prevailing in this lawsuit. That's absolutely right.

So the First Amendment is meant to protect everybody, no matter what they say, and no matter what the impact is of what they say. But the law also supposes that the benefit of this law is to allow people to gather and express what they believe to be true. If he truly believed in these theories and truly believed that what we were told about Sandy Hook never happened or was wrong, he would be protected. It's going on for four and a half, five years, the trauma that he imposes, the pain and suffering with the Lisey petals. And, you know, to say that Sandy Hook was a hoax and it never happened, it's an outright lie.

It's a total disrespect to myself, my son, the individuals who lost their lives that day. And he needs to, it needs to stop. And he needs to, it needs to stop. Certainly, speech that leads to the devastation of our lives cannot be protected by the First Amendment. That is their hope. He no longer gets to desecrate my son's memory. He no longer gets to negate my pain and profit from it. And profit from it. Elizabeth, what do you think this case is really about?

To the degree that this is ever going to reach a courtroom, what is on trial here? What's on trial is a change in our culture. Throughout our history, we've had conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. They were usually isolated. They were often shunned. But what's happened is that the Internet gives people a platform that they never had. People who were normally isolated, even by their own families saying, oh, come on, you know, you really don't believe that, do you? They find each other online. They form communities. They form networks of millions of people. And they reinforce each other. That's what's distorted about the reporting process here. If you wanted to find out the truth of an event, you do what reporters do. You go to the scene. You talk to people involved. You're respectful of their stories. You weigh conflicting points of view. You don't talk to each other. It's almost like a giant newsroom of millions in which the reporters all ask each other,

so what do you think? And they arrive at a consensus and they put it out there. I mean, it's a dystopian view of traditional journalism. I did this reporting. And as part of it, I spoke with the father of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old who was killed at Sandy Hook. And I asked him, you know, I know this is painful, but I wondered if you could just take me through that day. You know, what time they got up in the morning, what his son was wearing. He put on his carpenter pants that were a little too short because he just had a growth spurt. And he grabbed his Mario backpack and they stopped for breakfast.

He had the sausage sandwich because one time, you know, he ate bacon and he choked on it. And so bacon always scared him. So he had the sausage sandwich. And as they were on their way to the school, they talked about how at two o'clock that afternoon, they would be making gingerbread houses and Jesse's mom would come and that would be a special day. So they got to the school and he said, I walked him in and he gave me a big hug and said, I love you. And he just kind of darted around the corner. And that was the last time that he saw him. And then he said, and I would have liked to keep to myself that part of the day and that time with Jesse. And what these families are saying is it's not right that we should have to prove that the tragedy that took our children happened.

Elizabeth, thank you very much for this. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. By the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed. On Wednesday, the NFL and the owners of 32 professional football teams enacted a new policy that attempts to end public protest by players during the national anthem. The protests, which began in 2016, involved dozens of players kneeling on the field during the anthem to highlight racism and police brutality,

an act that was condemned by President Trump as disrespectful and unpatriotic. Wouldn't you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He's fired. He's fired! The new NFL policy allows players to remain off the field during the anthem as a form of private protest,

but imposes fines on teams if players publicly protest on the field during the anthem as a form of private protest, but imposes fines on teams if players publicly protest on the field. In response, a safety for the Philadelphia Eagles, Malcolm Jenkins, treated, quote, What NFL owners did today was thwart the players' constitutional right to express themselves and use our platform to draw attention to social injustices. Everyone loses, he added, when voices get stifled. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.