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.
Fox’s goose was cooked by internal communications that showed the television network was more worried about losing viewership of Donald Trump's supporters than it was about reporting the truth.
Thus, it repeatedly aired the false accusations made by Trump’s allies that Dominion, a manufacturer of voting machines, had cooperated in a vote-switching conspiracy to steal the election from the Republican incumbent, thus giving credibility to absurd claims that Fox either knew or should have known to be untrue. The coverage not only defamed Dominion, it contributed to the ultraconservative paranoia that helped produce the uprising at the nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
It wasn’t as if Fox News was just reporting on claims being made by public figures in public settings on matters of public interest. It was helping to promote those theories through its unbalanced coverage and the commentary of its highly influential and unapologetically biased hosts.
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.
