The wailing you heard across the land Tuesday afternoon was the sound of thousands of journalists lamenting the settlement of the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. An entire industry of reporters has been denied the schadenfreude of seeing their hated political and media competitor in the dock. An hilariously revealing courtroom account in Politico laments that “hopes were dashed–dreams torpedoed” by the settlement.

The settlement is a victory for Dominion, which said Fox will pay $787.5 million. Fox didn’t apologize, though it said “we acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” Those claims involved statements aired on Fox from the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell that blamed Dominion’s voting machines for Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020.

These columns never saw any evidence for such claims, and we said so in a Nov. 18, 2020, editorial, “Rage Against the Voting Machine.” Dominion cited that editorial more than once in its legal filings. On Dec. 1, 2020, we ran an op-ed from Dominion CEO John Poulos rebutting the claims against his company.

We share common ownership with Fox, and we have a weekend news program on the network. But neither Fox nor News Corp, our parent, is an ideological monolith, and our owners hire journalists to make independent judgments about what to cover or say in print or on television. The press routinely asserts otherwise, despite evidence to the contrary, but that’s the truth of our experience since Rupert Murdoch purchased the Journal in 2007.

As much as the media ached for a Fox defeat in court, they ought to thank the company for settling. A verdict against the network might well have hurt the rest of the press by making it harder to defend against defamation claims.

The network would no doubt have appealed a negative verdict in Delaware court, where the trial judge made rulings and comments that suggested an anti-Fox bias. Had the appeal made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justices might have reconsidered their 1964 precedent in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. That ruling requires plaintiffs to prove that false statements against public figures are made with “actual malice.” Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have said they would like to revisit that standard.

The media cheering for Fox to lose were in effect cheering for a verdict that could have meant more lawsuits, many of them meritless, against journalists. Their hatred of Fox and conservatives is so strong that they ignored their self-interest.

One journalistic lesson of the Dominion case is not to indulge crank claims because your audience wants to hear them. That includes claims about Russian collusion or stolen elections. Mr. Trump could never admit he defeated himself in 2020, so he claimed the election was stolen. He tweeted a false “report” about Dominion, and the grifters who attend him, then and now, spread it.

Journalism is an imperfect craft, and mistakes are inevitable. That’s why the bar for proving libel should be high. But the obligation of a journalist is to discern the truth, or at least as close as one can get to knowing it, and tell it to your audience straight.

— The Wall Street Journal