Earlier this week we asked the following questions of our Bridge Alliance, Coffee Party and Fulcrum communities regarding the recently settled defamation case against Fox News for its previous claims about unsubstantiated reports of fraud in the presidential election:
- How might we better distinguish between news, analysis and opinion to be better informed citizens?
- How can we pivot towards a more thought-provoking approach to news media in developing political discourse?
Days removed from the landmark settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the conversation surrounding Fox News’ responsibilities as a network rages on. Currently, the network is still entrenched in a pending defamation case with voting tech company Smartmatic; compared to its recently settled counterpart, this particular case could be settled for a much higher price tag. But a major consideration must be made whether or not the news network is directly responsible for defamatory comments made on its airwaves, with current legal shuffling potentially pinning it instead on the network’s hosts.
With all of these complexities considered, your responses indicate a clear need for adjustments (with fair criticism of the potentially overly complex nature of the questions). Many seem to find the fix simple: going back to the previous way of doing business, removing the money, the political posturing, and focusing on the bare bones truth. At least, clearly delineating between what is considered fact and opinion on all sides of the political discourse.
Here is a sample of your thoughts. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
If it offers analysis or opinion, label it as such. Clearly. Basically, do all good things taught traditionally in "objective" journalism before the trade decided its job was subjective "truth" rather than unbiased accuracy. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel. There was a time everybody knew the difference between news and opinion, and a time everybody knew what the standards of objective journalism were that, while rarely perfectly realized, could always be aspired to.- Quin Hillyer
We should return to the fairness doctrine. Media delivery of news is no longer a public service. It has become "info-tainment" with content determined by ratings. The only way to reverse this is to severely limit or prohibit the amount of time devoted to commercials during the delivery of news. - William R. Hunn
News is not supposed to be thought-provoking, news is supposed to be information-sharing backed up by fact checking! This isn't a Sociology class. - Michael Ornce
We should stay conservative and cover more than just the AP headlining stories. There are more than 6-8 important news stories in a day. - Deborah Brown
News used to be a public service by media outlets, it wasn't expected to make a profit, money corrupts everything it touches. - Chris Brimmer
In leading workshops for Truth in Common I've found that showing folks how both the CNN and Fox prime-time lineups are mostly opinion shows, and that you may see the same breaking news topics, but with different commentators, from one show to the other helps them see the overabundance of opinion in cable news programming. That's not to toss out cable news overall; many shows are about fact-based reporting, it's just important for folks to understand when they're taking in opinions vs being left to form their own. Generally speaking, national news outlets can be more polarizing than local ones; they're more vilified by those whose agenda is to discredit quality sources of information and thus become part of how we "choose sides." We need to support quality outlets on the national and local levels, as these are how we know what's going on in our communities and our nation. - Deanna Troust
Just tell the truth. - Elmer Harris
Being most informed I think would make us better able to distinguish between news, analysis and opinion. I myself look for sources that will provide links and footnotes that I can peruse myself to decide on the strength of the argument. So if I read an opinion, I look for that. - Ed Heath
It has become increasingly difficult to find political discourse in the growing amount of tribal violence in politics. Any progress would involve the news media sifting through the character attacks to find the underlying civics issue. - John Ruble
It's not easy to distinguish news and opinion when news is driven by a profit motive. The FOX saga is a shining example of that, but all of the networks are driven by profit. News analysis is a cancer on real news and it dominates. Non-profit news is the only way. - Randy Ricks
In order to best distinguish between news, analysis and opinion you have to get your news from more than one source. When you see several sources reporting roughly the same thing, then there is a reasonable degree of certainty that it is true. - Angela Bridgman
I'm sure there are many informed, respected, and patriotic citizens that have political opinions. That is foundational to America and gives us all perspective. In my opinion, there needs to be a change in the use of the word "News". News is intended to provide facts from reliable sources to allow citizens to make decisions. Any citizen should have the right to obtain political information provided it is not breaking the law or inciting violence. One can have political news, and political opinion, as long as the media is appropriately labeled we are free to consume. - Richard Detrick
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.