Fox News has avoided going to trial by reaching a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s smearing of the company following the 2020 election.
Some have cautioned against celebrating the settlement, along one of two tracks. The first group warns of precedent and the supposed watering down of reporters’ First Amendment rights that the lawsuit represents, an argument that, as writers on an editorial page that frequently criticizes the politically powerful, we would presumably be sympathetic to.
Yet while it would be a disaster for democracy for the press to suddenly be liable for criticism, denunciations and damaging revelations, or for reporters to have to bear the brunt of mistakes of the sort that are inevitable in daily coverage, Fox’s actions were neither legitimate criticism nor simple error.
This board, for example, accidentally misattributed a quote in a Tuesday editorial about a CCRB investigation into NYPD Chief of Department Jeff Maddrey. These things happen in a fast-paced news environment with writers and editors more squeezed than we’ve ever been. As soon as we were made aware, we made the correction and acknowledged our error.
Fox News, on the other hand, repeatedly made or amplified without clarification dangerous lies, despite being fully aware that these were misrepresentations, over and over again, and in defiance of Dominion’s good faith efforts to correct the record. The network neatly exemplified the “actual malice” standard that has long been the governing principle for media defamation.
The other track maintains that the nine-figure settlement, eye-popping as it is, is ultimately not much consequence for the giant network, representing less than a fifth of just last quarter’s revenues and allowing it to avoid any on-air acknowledgement of its misdeeds. On that front, we agree that this case alone isn’t enough of a repercussion for a news operation that actively participated in an attempt to not just misinform viewers but destroy their faith in our democracy. It should be the network’s own viewers and advertisers that really hit Fox where it hurts.
