Writers for the New York Times may have spread deceptive claims about the nonprofit journalism group Project Veritas, a judge ruled this week. In stories from 2020 about Project Veritas videos, writers Maggie Astor and Spencer Hsu inserted sentences that were opinions despite the articles being billed as news, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles Wood said. “If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article (and will seek to claim legal protections as opinion) it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader, including a court that may need to determine whether it is fact or opinion, that it is opinion,” Wood wrote in a 16-page decision denying the paper’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from Project Veritas. “The Articles that are the subject of this action called the Video ‘deceptive,’ but the dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by defendants’ counsel …