What were you expecting from the Fox/Dominion lawsuit?

There's a fine line between "accountability" and censorship.

In the Simpsons episode where they visit Australia,¹ Homer goes to a bar and orders one of these giant beers for which the Aussies are allegedly famous. The bartender delivered a huge can of Foster’s about half of Homer’s height. The Simpsons’ patriarch responds with a discouraged sigh, saying it’s “pretty big…I guess.”

To be fair he’s probably disappointed because it’s Fosters, which my Aussie friends tell me is basically the Natural Light of Australia.

That’s kind of the response I’m seeing to the blockbuster legal settlement reached between Fox News Channel and Dominion, which will see the voting machines company paid $787 million for damage caused by the “news” network’s defamatory reporting. This comes after a discovery process in which executives’ and reporters’ and hosts’ text messages and emails were released, showing how little they believe in what they’ve been reporting.

And people are angry that, I dunno, the trial judge didn’t rule there’s a super-special “Fox” exemption to The First Amendment which would make the channel illegal?

I’m with Amanda on this one:

Okay, there are ways this could have been even better, especially if the channel had been required to apologize and retract its stories on the air. I would lose no sleep if they ended up having to pay out even more money - maybe ten figures - to Dominion.

But there is no guarantee a costly and lengthy trial would have gone in Dominion’s favor. If you give me a $787M right now, or even a 95% chance of getting $1.5 billion in five years with a 5% chance of receiving nothing, I know which option I’m taking.

More importantly, people are upset that this expensive and humiliating process means there will be no “accountability” for Fox News Channel, to which I respond: what, exactly, do you mean by accountability?