In the settlement that Fox News reached this week with Dominion Voting Systems, there was no requirement for the broadcaster to acknowledge its deceit or to apologize for it.
No matter.
The size of the settlement — nearly $800 million — says all that is necessary. No company willingly forks out half of a year’s profit unless it thinks that going to trial could have cost it even more.
It’s not easy for a public figure, which the judge agreed Dominion to be for the purposes of its lawsuit, to successfully sue a media company for libel, nor should it be. The nation is best served by an aggressive press serving in a watchdog role in matters involving the public’s business. If that independent watchdog on occasion gets its information wrong, that is an acceptable tradeoff for the public service it provides.
That First Amendment protection, however, has limits, as spelled out almost 60 years ago in a landmark Supreme Court ruling, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. Freedom of the press does not mean the freedom to air defamatory material that the media outlet either knows to be false or recklessly disregards whether it might be false.
Fox obviously believed that if the case had gone to trial, a jury would have found the network guilty of one or both of those offenses, thus forfeiting the protection that the First Amendment would normally provide.
Eight hundred million dollars is a tacit acknowledgment that Fox News covered the aftermath of Trump’s defeat irresponsibly. It acted not as an objective journalistic organization but as an unprincipled panderer to those who were promoting the delusion of a stolen election and those who were swallowing it.
