Opinion | Fox News settlement shows media outlets don’t have a blank check

In other words, the system is working as the Supreme Court intended when it set down the rules in its 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision — and it does not require a rethink that would threaten journalists’ ability to report and criticize without fear of facing defamation suits for errors made in good faith.

The case law says that, to win a defamation case, a public figure must show that a statement about them was false and that it was published with “actual malice” — “that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard for the truth.” This is a high standard that exists because journalists should not be punished for honest mistakes. But Fox News apparently worried enough about losing, even with such protections, that the company paid $787.5 million in the largest ever publicly disclosed settlement in a libel action.

Delaware Judge Eric M. Davis ruled ahead of a potential trial that it was beyond dispute Fox News had aired false statements about Dominion’s voting machines after the 2020 election. This left a jury to decide whether the cable channel did so with actual malice.

Through discovery and depositions, Dominion’s lawyers amassed significant evidence that Fox News’s executives and on-air talent knew better than to traffic in bizarre conspiracy theories. They argued that network brass allowed falsehoods on air because they feared viewers would migrate to other channels if they didn’t. Fox News, bracing for the likelihood of defeat in district court, involved appellate lawyers in its defense at the trial court level, a sign it was preparing to fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

Fox News, which faces a separate defamation suit from Smartmatic, another voting-tech company, agreed to settle in part because a jury could have awarded Dominion even more than the $1.6 billion the company sought.

The Fox News settlement comes amid an increasingly assertive movement to curb Sullivan’s media protections to make it easier to sue journalists. Mr. Trump has clamored to change libel laws for years. In a December court filing as part of a lawsuit against CNN, the former president called it a “perfect vehicle” for the Supreme Court to “reconsider whether Sullivan’s standard truly protects the democratic values embodied by the First Amendment.”

Mr. DeSantis calls Sullivan a shield that allows reporters to “smear” anyone they don’t like. He’s pushing state legislation, likely to trigger a Supreme Court review, that would make it easy to successfully sue journalists who quote anonymous sources by creating the presumption, under the law, that any information attributed to them is false.

Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit cited media bias “against the Republican Party” in a 2021 opinion that called on the high court to rethink the precedent.

Yet Sullivan protects speakers equally no matter where they fall on the ideological spectrum. That’s why conservative talk-radio hosts and bloggers have mobilized against Mr. DeSantis’s assault on freedom of the press.

Since the trial of New York printer John Peter Zenger in 1735, freedom of the press has been a foundational element in the success of the American experiment. The Supreme Court recognized this history in its 1964 Sullivan decision. Back then, a local Alabama police commissioner sued the New York Times for running an advertisement decrying mistreatment of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that contained a few factual inaccuracies. An all-White local jury awarded $500,000 to the commissioner, L.B. Sullivan.

Recognizing that this was an effort to bankrupt and harass those covering the civil rights movement, the Supreme Court overturned the verdict. Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote about what he called “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

These principles are as applicable today as they were in 1964. It’s as vital as ever for a robust and independent free press to be able to do its job without undue worries about being harassed by libel suits. The Fox News settlement suggests that media outlets don’t have a blank check. Sullivan does not need to be fixed. Rolling back the precedent, on the other hand, would profoundly imperil free speech.