As COVID-19 cases emerged throughout the nation and college after college closed its doors halfway through the spring term, one organization bucked the trend. In March, Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia announced that it would bring students back to campus following spring break to complete the semester, a choice for which they were rapidly slammed by the media. Now, the institution is suing the New York Times for character assassination.
In a short article titled, “Liberty University Revives Its Students, and Coronavirus Worries, Too,” Times press reporter Elizabeth Williamson composed that the university underwent an outbreak of the coronavirus upon reopening. The post mentions that “almost a dozen” trainees had COVID signs which the school had actually neglected federal government standards in reopening. Liberty has actually denounced these claims as “intentionally incorrect and defamatory.”
According to the university, there were no recognized cases of COVID-19 on campus, nor were there “almost a dozen” students with COVID symptoms, both of which the reporter was notified. Liberty likewise states the reporter was aware that the school remained in full compliance with federal government directives.That didn’t matter to the New york city Times, however. The report sparked outrage throughout the internet, with outlets like Vox decrying a”public health disaster in the making, “the Daily Beast pricing quote an emergency clinic doctor stating that”people will pass away”if the college resumed, and BuzzFeed News explaining Liberty trainees as”baffled and concerned “by the choice. As a result of the article, the university says it has and continues to sustain “huge harm to its organisation and credibility, “for which it presumes damages.” She [Williamson] was there as a producer and director to engineer a particular fictional tale that portrayed Liberty and its President as a caricature the New York Times’ liberal audience would love: backwards, careless, anti-science, accountable for getting individuals ill in a pandemic, and closely connected to and mirroring President Trump,” the university asserted in its complaint.Liberty University
says that by the close of the academic year not a single resident trainee had contracted the virus. In the months that have unfolded since the New york city Times article, some in the media have concerned acknowledge that the hysteria was unwarranted. In May, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed in which the author kept in mind, “The doomsday anticipated when Mr. Falwell announced Liberty students would return after spring break never ever happened.” A post in the Washington Examiner also kept in mind, “Despite some 750 media reports that Liberty University was composing COVID-19 death sentences for some 1,100 trainees returning after spring break, the Virginia Christian college recorded no cases with students on school and is now holding itself up as the ‘design’ to follow in the fall.”
Regardless of the time and expense, school president Jerry Falwell, Jr. informed Sean Hannity that the school is taking the claim “all the way.”
” [W] e are holding the New york city Times liable for their malicious and false reporting and their violation of the measures we required to protect our students,” he said in a declaration. “Politically-motivated attacks by the mainstream news media that disparage and libel conservatives and Christians should not be allowed the United States of America and will not be tolerated by Liberty University.”