A Handsome Settlement in the Dominion ‐​Fox News Case

Walter OlsonThose who seek to “open up” libel laws to make way for more defamation suits and higher damages sometimes talk as if the speech‐​protective constitutional standard announced by the Supreme Court in New York Times v. Sullivan makes it impossible for libel suits to prevail even when starkly meritorious — when egregious misconduct by the media has resulted in the circulation of gross falsehoods that cause severe damage to someone’s good name.Today ’s settlement, in which Foxhas reportedly agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems a handsome $787.5 million, should take the wind out of demands to make America ’s libel law more like Great Britain’s. A previously obscure company took a plainly meritorious case to court, went up against one of the richest and most well ‐​lawyered media defendants in the world, and not only won, but won big. That shows — as most lawyers knew all along — that while Sullivan may be speech‐​protective, it never did eviscerate common law rights to sue for defamation. Cato Institute adjunct scholar Andrew Grossman, writing w ith David B. Rifkin Jr.,has argued that while Justice Brennan ’s reasoning in Sullivan may be loose and policy‐​oriented, the rules at which he arrived are not that far from legal authority in many earlier cases, which had long employed formulas that in practice generated results not far from an “actual malice” standard. We should remember also that even under the media‐...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs