Fox News settlement is the best result for everybody
Quin Hillyer
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When the Dominion voting machine company settled its defamation suit this afternoon against Fox News, the whole country benefited by avoiding a bad precedent on First Amendment press freedoms.
A bad precedent could have been set if the case had reached a verdict for either side. Without a settlement, there was almost no possible outcome that would have avoided great mischief down the line.
FOX REACHES $787M SETTLEMENT WITH DOMINION
Let’s not mince words: Fox was wrong in how it presented the topic of then-President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Deeply, unethically wrong. Almost every person who worked for Fox knew the claims of Trump and his advisers were bogus. Yet they continued to put on the air the advisers and lawyers so Team Trump could keep making those false claims, with barely a peep of challenge from Fox’s on-air hosts. The uncritical, nearly unquestioning provision of a platform for those lies helped foster the dangerous conditions that led to an inexcusable incursion at the Capitol, among other egregious and continuing social pathologies.
If, after a full trial and likely appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, Fox had escaped without punishment, then unscrupulous media outlets far and wide would have taken the result as a green light for pernicious behavior. Any decision in favor of Fox would have provided a playbook for pundits to follow to bend reality to their own preferences far more than they even do now. Just get the guests to do the lying, ask them a few questions that seem to evince a patina of skepticism, label the show as an expression of opinion, and report in passing but with a sneering expression that, of course, the other side rejects the claims of the guests.
And then hide under the giant refuge called the First Amendment.
Then again … yes, then again, a verdict against Fox might have done even more damage to the common weal than one in its favor. Any decision against Fox would have had the effect of narrowing First Amendment protections in ways antithetical to freedom. If the Supreme Court eventually ruled a news outlet liable for defamation for material (1) presented as opinion rather than as hard facts (2) by guests rather than by the actual personnel of the outlet, (3) when the guests literally represented the president of the United States, (4) arguing that the very workings of constitutional republicanism were at stake, and (5) without any evidence of the news team’s actual animus against the allegedly defamed subject, then press freedoms would be far more parlous than for decades they had been assumed to be.
After all, the fact that a president’s representatives were contesting the election was indisputably real news. To say that a news outlet has no right to allow them a forum to make their case would be absurd. That’s what news outlets do: Interview newsmakers. If a network secures an interview with Vladimir Putin, knowing that the Russian dictator is not just a habitual liar but an instigator of mass murder, should that network be legally liable for any defamations Putin might spew? Of course not. What Putin says is news. Yet a verdict against Fox would open the floodgates to defamation lawsuits and thus have a chilling effect on the free flow of claims, counterclaims, information, and ideas.
Today’s lawsuit settlement deters bad journalistic behavior by forcing a massive payout ($787.5 million) for the putrid ethics. But it sets no hard, fast legal precedent that massively erodes the bulwark of the First Amendment.
Win-win.