If you choose to believe the 2020 presidential election was sToLeN, you must believe Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion in a settlement, rather than present any of that evidence. You must believe that Fox News had a quick and easy way to win this lawsuit and simply refused to use it — even though the news distributor had more than 700 million good reasons to point to this evidence, if it existed.

Previous defamation law had established the neutral-report privilege — the notion that covering a public figure’s false accusations was not inherently defamatory, so long as it was newsworthy — and the privilege of opinion, as statements of opinion cannot be objectively measured and thus cannot be defamatory. ... But in mid March, Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis swatted those arguments away, and his reasoning is clear. Davis reviewed the filings of Dominion and the network and concluded that in 19 cases, Fox News hosts or guests had made comments that were false statements of fact, not assertions of opinion, and that could not be defended as standard, fair-minded inquiry.

It is unlikely that networks like Fox News can afford to keep loose-cannon hosts anymore.

A loose-cannon host who is unpredictable and capable of saying anything — and Fox News is not the only network with on-air talent who fits this description — can end up costing his network hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s not just more than the advertising revenue of any one program; that’s a large chunk of the advertising sales for the entire network over the course of a year. The cost-benefit analysis of cable-news personalities is about to change — and the market for “you never know what he’s going to say next” is about to crash.