MSNBC Legal Analyst Calls for US Government to ‘Step In’ and Regulate Fox News With Significant Fine Over ‘Big Lie’
MSNBC Legal Analyst Andrew Weissmann argued that the only way to deter media networks from “promulgating lies” — using Fox News Dominion lawsuit as an example — is for the US government to step in and regulate this conduct.
On Tuesday, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million as a settlement in the minutes before opening statements of the defamation trial were set to be given.
Weissman, who served in the Department of Justice and took a senior role in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into former President Donald Trump, has long been a critic of Fox News and was on Morning Joe Friday morning for his legal expertise on the First Amendment and the current state of opinion media.
Eugene Robinson first noted how “a lot of people in media who were appalled at what Fox did in defaming Dominion and who were rooting for Fox to lose at the same time, who worried that an adverse ruling to Fox if they’ve gone to trial, might have an impact on libel law might have an impact on the governing.”
Robinson then noted how the landmark Supreme Court ruling, Sullivan v. The New York Times, “gives wide latitude to reputable news organizations, and that is kind of potentially a threat” before asking Weissmann, “How do we break this cycle, and how should the media be thinking about this?”
Weissmann suggested that Fox News was not a “reputable” news organization and included the National Enquirer for “colluding with the Trump campaign,” as he alleged.
“The key word that you used in Eugene is the word ‘reputable’,” he said. “So if I were at a reputable news organization, I don’t know that I’d be particularly worried about what I saw at the National Enquirer, which was completely colluding with the Trump campaign, or what we saw at Fox News.”
“If you talk to any reputable journalist, whether it’s in television, whether it’s in print media, this is so far beyond the pale in terms of what news is supposed to be,” he hammered home. “You’re just not colluding with one political campaign. So I don’t think that there’s a real sort of, you know, slippery slope here where we see liability here.”
He then noted that the Dominion settlement was driven by lawyers doing what was in the best interest of a private company and their investors, saying “They’re not — their interest is not to get a public apology to defend American democracy or to protect the information flow. They’re trying to get the damages to their client.”
“And so that’s where you really think the FEC —which did impose a small fine on the National Enquirer — needs to step in,” Weissmann concluded. “And it can’t be a small fine. “‘
“You really need to be thinking about, okay, what is the business model for the National Enquirer? What is the business model for Fox News and the next media company that’s going to pretend to be giving news but is actually going to be promulgating lies? Is there going to be some regulatory damage that’s going to deter that?” he continued.
“So we don’t have a repetition because it’s really easy to just simply avoid denigrating a company so you won’t get sued but still promulgate a big lie. And so you need to have the government step in to have some kind of regulation of that kind of conduct.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
