Last Friday, a Texas jury ordered Alex Jones to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages to the parents of a child who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, adding to the $4.1 million in compensatory damages he must pay for the suffering he put them through by claiming for years that the nation's deadliest school shooting was a hoax.

Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting was real but has claimed that his statements about Sandy Hook were protected by the First Amendment.

The news of Alex Jones being fined was met with unrestrained jubilation across liberal precincts.

The New York Times carried a piece headlined "Why Alex Jones's Trial Won't Stop the Spread of Lies," and that headline was altered to "Don't Expect Alex Jones's Comeuppance to Stop Lies."  CNN carried a piece headlined "Will the Alex Jones trials change conspiracy culture?"  MSNBC called Jones a "Sickening liar."

CBS News carried a piece headlined "Alex Jones judgment: The cost of lies."  The Washington Post carried a piece with a juvenile headline: "Liar Liar, Alex Jones on Fire."  NPR carried a piece titled "How Alex Jones mainstreamed conspiracy theories."  The Associated Press carried a piece headlined "Alex Jones' $49.3M verdict and the future of misinformation."  

"Comedians" John Oliver and Stephen Colbert gleefully mocked Alex Jones following the verdict.  Piers Morgan was elated.

The fact that compulsive fabricators in the media failed to see the irony proves that the self-righteous seldom have any self-awareness.

So let's look very briefly at the record of the mainstream media on being factual:

When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, all of the mainstream media worked with various government agencies and Hillary Clinton's allies to amplify the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

The gist of the conspiracy theory was that Trump had defeated Hillary by colluding with the Russians.  The promoters of the theory couldn't explain the details of how Trump and the Kremlin worked together.  They couldn't provide any proof that any votes were altered by Russian agents.  They couldn't offer any proof that Trump had any connections with Kremlin.  Yet they ran with the story and amplified it every day.

Fanatical Democrat operatives such as Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell frequently outdid each other in the department of outrageousness and mendacity, as did many pundits in the media.  Some even claimed that Trump was groomed by the Kremlin during the '80s.  "Comedy" shows such as SNL also played their part in promoting the hoax.

The noise got so loud that even cowardly GOP members were compelled to concur with the fabrication.  In the end, it caused the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, whose team consisted of Trump-hating Democrats.  The media carried it with glee; every day, they would cite leaks from unnamed sources that the walls were closing in on Trump and that he may even be forced to resign.

After 674 days, which is almost two years, the probe was completed, and not even a smidgen of evidence of Trump-Russia collusion was found.  Mueller purposefully worded his report to leave some ambiguity about Trump's innocence.  The Democrats and the media used vagueness to claim that there was indeed collusion, but Trump was such a master criminal that he had left no evidence despite colluding.  To this day, crackpots call Trump an agent of Putin. 

This was the most preposterous conspiracy theory in the history of modern America.  Donald Trump has lived all of his life in the public spotlight, for decades, and his successes are well documented.  To claim that Trump is a Russian agent is ludicrous.  Only a loony conspiracy theorist would make such an absurd claim.  Yet the mainstream media carried it with malicious intent.

It not only was a personal attack on President Trump and his supporters, but also an accusation of treason — which carries the death penalty.  The relentless lies eroded trust in the foundation of democracy — i.e., elections — among a strikingly wide swath of the public.

It most likely cost the Republicans the House during the 2018 midterms.  Once the Democrats took control of the House, it was probes galore.  Those charades continue to this very day with the January 6 congressional committee investigation.

The news media thus helped normalized a conspiracy theory and made it part of mainstream history.

New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently conceded that the news media, intelligence agencies, and the Democrat party have waged war on Trump and spitefully spread misinformation about nonexistent collusion and even the "golden shower tapes."  Even far-left "comedian" Jon Stewart ridiculed the media for carrying the hoax.

But apart from these two, few have had the civility to even admit that they erred.  Some of them did, after all, have Pulitzer Prizes on their walls for it.

Will anybody in the media who promoted this insane conspiracy theory be punished or be compelled to pay damages?

We all know the answer to that.

In addition to the Russia collusion narrative, the media peddled numerous other fabrications about President Trump.  They claimed that Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office.  They claimed he called neo-Nazis "very fine people."  They claimed that a protest on January 6 that went overboard as a crowd control issue was a violent insurrection.  On some occasions, Trump was branded bigoted, senile, and clueless, and on others, he was a bigoted, evil criminal genius.

Beyond Trump, the media also carried myriad lies about COVID-19 and the effectiveness of vaccines.  The media also suppressed information about the harmful side-effects of the vaccine.  Perhaps it is time that the relatives of those who suffered from the vaccine take the media to court, too.

Back to news media coverage of the Alex Jones verdict:

The WaPo carried a piece headlined "How Alex Jones was embraced by Trump, Rogan years after Sandy Hook lies."

This is the reason the media are delighted to see Alex Jones in trouble.  Alex Jones and Infowars were among the first pro-Trump groups to be deplatformed by Big Tech.  Some in the media are claiming that Jones may have lied on the stand during the trial and hence could be charged with perjury.

It would be worth knowing who paid the legal fees of the parents, given the alignment of the left in this case.

The left sees Jones, who's hardly a conservative, as an ally of President Trump who hence has to be silenced and crushed.  They think Jones is one of the reasons Trump was elected in 2016, because he maligned their favorite, Hillary Clinton.

A TODAY show presentation noted that Jones had been emailing with former Trump adviser Roger Stone, and that the January 6 committee was "looking into" allegations that Jones was involved in the chaotic riot. 

It seems a little distant as a thing to mention in this case, but that's because it's not really about Sandy Hook.

Perhaps the media think they are the only group that can malign others with impunity.

Legal egalitarianism that causes all citizens to be equal before the law is a fundamental tenet of any civilized democracy.  There cannot be dual standards; the penalty for the same offense has to be identical across the board.

If Alex Jones, who is perceived as a pro-Trump and an anti-establishment figure, is penalized for spreading misinformation, but the Democrats' establishment loyalists who peddle insane conspiracy theories are honored with Pulitzer Prizes, something is gravely wrong.

Image: Screen shot from video posted by TODAY via YouTube.