When I was looking for some infromation on the Kyle Rittenhouse case, I found a tweet from a Korean War veteran Trump supporter. The tweet claims that Kyle Rittenhouse filed a $400 thousand lawsuit against a media organization, CNN. The person that tweeted this also wants the President of the United States, Joe Biden, to be charged. However, this is the opinion part of the tweet, so I will be focusing on the first claim.
If you do not know much about the Kyle Rittenhouse Case, you can check out this Wikipedia article: Kenosha Unrest Shooting. This seems like something that Kyle Rittenhouse would do based on his past actions. However, there was no evidence on the tweet and was from a person that would have a extreme bias towards him. I searched up a Politifact analysis on this topic, but the Facebook post they analysed has slightly different claims. The facebook post claimed that Rittenhouse filed a $400 million lawsuit towards CNN.
Facebook post:
Headline of Politifact Analysis:
To start of my analysis, I first needed to know if Politifacts is a reliable fact checking source. After doing some research, the source is proven to be accurate most of the time. Based on Media Bias Fact Check, the parent organization of Politifacts, Poynter Institute, is factural the majority of the time and has very little bias. This source has been critiqued by both sides of the political spectrum, meaning that the bias is in the reviewers, not Poynter Institute.
Because this source is reliable, I will be using Politifacts as my fact-checking source instead of Snopes.com, as that website has no articles on Kyle Rittenhouse filing a lawsuit against CNN. Due to this fact-check it is clear that the claim that Rittenhouse filed a $400 million lawsuit towards CNN is false. However, I still wanted to know if Rittenhouse filed a $400 thousand lawsuit towards CNN. This was more tricky as no fact-checking source mentioned this. After doing some more research though, I found out that this more conservative claim is still false. Before looking at better sources, I would like to mention that the person who tweeted the $400 thousand claim does not know if this fact is true. Here is an image of a comment and the person’s reponse:
The two final pieces of evidence that proves that this claim is false is an article from AP News and another tweet. Two days after the person tweeted the false claim, an AP News article proved the person wrong. AP is reliable for many reasons. Firstly, the organization was founded 175 years ago and is a non-profit cooperative. The Media Bias Fact Check is even better than Poynter Institute with a very high factural reporting rating. The source that the article used is actually a tweet from the offical Kyle Rittenhouse legal fund. If a person or organization says the claims from their own supporters are wrong, then the claim definitely wrong.
In conclusion, the claim that Kyle Rittenhouse filed a $400 thousand lawsuit against CNN is false.