NYT’s Fake News Backfires — Forced to Pay $9.25 Million to Athlete

An Alabama jury didn't just side with a college athlete against the New York Times, they hit the paper for $9.25 million. That's not a nuisance settlement or a quiet correction buried on page A19. That's a jury of ordinary people looking at what the Times printed and deciding it crossed a real line, one that cost a real person real damage.

For years the defense against these suits has been the same: we're the paper of record, we have lawyers, we have the First Amendment, and juries in flyover states aren't going to touch us. Well, an Alabama jury just touched them for nine figures worth of reputation. When a defamation case actually gets to a verdict and the plaintiff wins that big, it usually means the evidence was ugly enough that "actual malice" wasn't some abstract legal hurdle, it was something the jury could see plainly in front of them.

What's striking is how little national attention this got compared to how much attention the original story presumably got. Reputations get destroyed in a news cycle and rebuilt, if at all, in a courtroom years later with a fraction of the audience watching. This athlete had to spend years and real money to get a jury to say what should have been obvious from the start: get the facts right before you run the story.

The Times will appeal, and maybe the number gets knocked down. But the verdict itself is the story. A newsroom that lectures the country about misinformation just got told by twelve Alabamians that it peddled some of its own, and it's going to cost them.