The FOX/Dominion lawsuit is providing some interesting reports in discovery, which contradict their on-air positions; they knew they were lying, but they also knew what their viewers wanted to hear.
It turns out that you can smear individuals and vaguely-specified groups all day long but if you tell a big enough lie about a business, they sue you.
The only problem of course is the amount at play: barely more than one billion dollars as damage for Dominion, when the only thing that will teach Ruppert his lesson is to set a multiplier of about one hundred and make this the punitive damage amount for the American people.
Here's waiting for the supreme court to step in and adjust.
Well, the court gets to determine it, and "courts: the last bastion of truth" doesn't sound so unreasonable.
But, yes, this is why democratic pluralism is so important; you can't fight a big bully all by yourself, and sometimes it's better to get some medium-sized slightly less bullying third parties as allies against them.
I particularly relish the irony of the second ruling, given a major theme behind the X-Men is a struggle to be treated like humans in a society determined to other them as mutants.
I mean, if you wanted to go about usurping the enforcement of truth by eliminating actual bastions of truth, and you succeeded, then of course, in your success, everyone will think you're the last bastion of enforcing truth. After all, you, who are the last bastion of truth, are saying you are, so that proves it.
Which is why bastions of enforcing truth are just a really bad idea. If you want truth to flourish, you can't silo responsibility for it away in some benevolent elite. Critical thinking, media literacy, awareness of rhetoric, and the intersection of all of that with accounts of history have to be bog standard skills in the population.
It's unfortunate that most Americans are opposed to teaching those things. They don't like it when kids come home asking questions like "Why doesn't the Declaration of Independence say all men and women are created equal?" or "After a corpus callosotomy, is there still one soul in the body, or two, or two half-souls?" or "Why can't three people be married?" or "Why aren't you answering my questions?". Parents don't want their kids growing up to be free. They want them growing up to be copies of their parents.
It turns out that you can smear individuals and vaguely-specified groups all day long but if you tell a big enough lie about a business, they sue you.