Amy Davidson Sorkin in The New Yorker, March 19, 2023, writes that should Fox win its defamation battle with Dominion Voting Systems, it would show that no matter how egregious your disregard of the truth might be, there would be no accountability under Times v. Sullivan thus undermining the decision.
Noah Feldman of Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, March 18, 2023, writes that there is a way to allow news outlets to address false claims of a public figure without getting embroiled in defamation. “The outlet need not say it believes the statement is false; just that it is reporting what someone else thinks. If the statement is made by an employee of the outlet, then the outlet should make it clear that the statement reflects the employee’s opinion, not a fact. If this approach were adopted, it would not matter how many times the outlet repeated or reported the false claims, so long as they were presented as someone else’s factual claims or as opinion.” Libel law persists and public discourse does not become a “fully fact-free zone.”