The last-minute settlement of Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News defused a high-stakes test of the First Amendment protections afforded to the media. But more challenges are likely on the horizon, according to The NY Times.
Nearly 60 years after the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, which made it harder for public figures to win libel cases against the media, the landmark ruling is under sustained assault from judges, politicians and lawyers, most but not all of them conservatives.
If Fox News lost, a powerful news organization faced the prospect of record-breaking damages. But a victory for the cable news network would have raised questions — even among lawyers who represent the news media — about whether federal courts’ interpretations of the First Amendment made it impossible to hold anyone accountable for reckless and damaging lies.
It’s not a coincidence that a founder of one of the law firms that represented Dominion is leading a campaign to get the Supreme Court to overturn its decision in Sullivan.
The agreement by Fox News to settle for $787.5 million — among the largest payouts ever in a defamation lawsuit — means that the scope of the Sullivan ruling will not be tested this time.
In that 1964 decision, the justices ruled that to win a libel suit, public officials had to do more than show that factual inaccuracies in an article harmed them. They also had to prove that those falsehoods were the product of “actual malice” — in other words, they were intentional or caused by a reckless disregard for the truth.
For decades, the Sullivan ruling was widely regarded as an essential safeguard that allowed journalists to aggressively cover public figures without fear that accidentally publishing an error — even a serious one — could expose them to devastating damages.
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