Fox News settlement is the best result for everybody

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.

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.