A Cost of Doing Business

In a recent post, Mourning Lots of Unvaccinated Texans, I wrote about the people who died from COVID-19 because they refused vaccinations: maybe taking (one’s) medical advice from Fox News wasn’t such a great idea after all.

But we live a country in which free enterprise is the law of the land.  Does Fox have the right to disseminate whatever disinformation it chooses, if by so doing it makes money? What does “free speech” mean as we find it in the First Amendment to our constitution?

Well, this “law of the land” is not absolute.  After all, Fox did have to shell out $778 million to Dominion Voting Systems following an agreement to settle the defamation case; Fox had repeatedly broadcasted what they knew for a fact to be false, that the plaintiff had rigged its election machines to “flip votes” from Trump to Biden.

Maybe the take-away is this: if you have no integrity and you’ll do whatever it takes to come out on top financially, roll the dice and take your chance.  It cost Fox close to a billion dollars.