The Fox-Dominion Settlement – WSJ

As much as the media ached for a Fox defeat in court, they ought to thank the company for settling. A verdict against the network might well have hurt the rest of the press by making it harder to defend against defamation claims.

The network would no doubt have appealed a negative verdict in Delaware court, where the trial judge made rulings and comments that suggested an anti-Fox bias. Had the appeal made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justices might have reconsidered their 1964 precedent in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. That ruling requires plaintiffs to prove that false statements against public figures are made with actual malice. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have said they would like to revisit that standard.

The media cheering for Fox to lose were in effect cheering for a verdict that could have meant more lawsuits, many of them meritless, against journalists. Their hatred of Fox and conservatives is so strong that they ignored their self-interest.

One journalistic lesson of the Dominion case is not to indulge crank claims because your audience wants to hear them. That includes claims about Russian collusion or stolen elections. Mr. Trump could never admit he defeated himself in 2020, so he claimed the election was stolen. He tweeted a false report about Dominion, and the grifters who attend him, then and now, spread it.

via www.wsj.com

A fair point.