MSNBC’s Weissmann: Government Should ‘Step In’ to Regulate Fox News

MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann said Friday on “Morning Joe” that the only way to deter Fox News from “promulgating lies” is for the U.S. government to step in and regulate.

Co-host Eugene Robinson said, “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, Supreme Court decisions Sullivan v. The New York Times, that gives wide latitude to reputable news organizations, and that is kind of potentially a threat. How do we break this cycle, and how should the media be thinking about this?”

Weissmann said, “The key word that you used in Eugene is the word reputable. 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. 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 continued, “These are private parties that are suing. 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. 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? 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.”

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