After decades of playing referee, judge, jury, and guardian of "truth," the mainstream media has loved looking down its elite nose at everybody outside their little club.

They claim conservative outlets are "misinformation" and independent journalists are "conspiracy theorists."

And when the New York Times publishes something, we're all supposed to get our knees and thank God. Because surely every adult in the room has checked their homework, right?

Wrong.

As we all know, the NYT's esteemed reputation has been going down the drain for a while now.

All of America has seen what happens when the media gets a story wrong and the outrage machine runs amuck before the facts kick in. The Covington Catholic kids are a perfect example of that. Those poor kids were publicly dragged through the mud after a viral moment with a Native American activist was sold as a pack of MAGA teenagers bullying him. Of course, that's not what happened. So, lawsuits quickly followed, and several media companies eventually settled with Nicholas Sandmann.

Then there was the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" debacle. That little quip became a national slogan even though the Justice Department's own forensics and witness investigation revealed that never happened.

And of course, there were years of breathless, Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX coverage surrounding Donald Trump, much of which left millions of Americans convinced the media had stopped reporting politics and started participating in it.

So, we're supposed to trust NewsGuard, while they place Communist Chinese state propaganda above American news outlets whose politics it doesn't like.

Got it.

But this latest story doesn't involve a conservative outlet being called unreliable or spreading fake news.

This time it involves the granddaddy of so-called "respectable American journalism" getting smacked down by an actual jury.

And for the New York Times, this one is historic, and it's gotta hurt.

Back in 2023, the NYT reported that University of Alabama basketball player Kai Spears was at the scene of a deadly shooting.