It wouldn’t surprise us if the settlement of the libel case brought against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems proves to be the beginning of a turn for the better in American journalism. The claim against Fox News was, at $1.6 billion, enormous. Even the three quarters of a billion spondulix for which they settled, though, has to be a sobering figure, enough to gain the attention of the other giants of journalism.

The settlement comes at a time when public regard for the press writ large is at some kind of a nadir, as the publisher of the Sun, Dovid Efune, never fails to mark when he’s meeting with readers. One poll he cites found that 84 percent of respondents reckoned the “mainstream media posed a threat to democracy,” a sense that was bipartisan. Another poll he cites reckons that but 16 percent of Americans trust the press. Parts of Congress fare better.

We’re not of the view, though, that the Murdoch press is the cause of these problems. Little doubt lurks in our minds that there was a lapse of attention by the top brass of Fox News in respect of what at least a faction of it was doing on the 2020 election story. It aired claims of fraud that it couldn’t substantiate and left Fox News open to a demand for damages. Yet they were often quoting government aides, lawyers involved in lawsuits, or elected figures.

The collapse in the regard for the press, though, stems largely from the Democratic Party-aligned and liberal papers. The nadir was tested when the Times formally abandoned the ideal of objectivity. That was in 2016, when a front page column advanced the idea that the rise of Donald Trump made the goal of objectivity no longer logical. The sentiment was later endorsed by the Times’ editor, Dean Baquet, who said the columnist had “nailed it.”

It’s hard to think of anything at Fox News that has done as much damage to the standing of the press as the Times’ abandonment of the idea of objectivity and its, and other liberal papers’, refusal to accept the decision of the voters in the 2016 election. Not even close. Three of the leading columnists of the Times actually suggested, without any reference to the constitutional definition of treason, that President Trump was a traitor, or close to it.

The greatest adherence to the principle of journalistic objectivity, moreover, came during this period from part of the Murdoch press itself. We speak of the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page came to stand for what we like to call “editorial objectivity” — meaning reporting-based editorial writing. It fought to defend those policies of President Trump with which it agreed, without veering from what its reporting told it was the true vote in 2020.

Editorial objectivity wasn’t invented by the Journal’s editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, but he offered an example from within the Murdoch empire that will be studied for a generation or more. He managed to steer clear of the shoals on which Fox News got into trouble — precisely by shoe-leather reporting on deadline. Call it Journalism 101, which to us illuminates the path forward for the Murdoch empire and all the rest of us. 

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This editorial was updated from the bulldog to include a link to the Journal’s editorial ‘Rage Against the Voting Machine,’ which was cited by the Journal today in its own editorial on the settlement between Fox and Dominion.