A judge on a Washington state court has a chance May 21 to quash a dangerous, outlandish lawsuit against Fox News that would eviscerate First Amendment media freedoms. He should indeed quash it.

The suit is brought by a 3-year-old group of leftist provocateurs called WASHLITE, which stands for the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics. They are suing Fox News for alleged violations of the states Consumer Protection Act, which outlaws deceptive practices in the course of commerce. WASHLITE says Fox should be punished because some of its on-air personnel, like many other members of the media, spent weeks downplaying the danger of the international proliferation of the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19. The result, says the group, was that its members health and livelihoods were put at risk, and indeed, it says one of its members contracted COVID-19.

The obvious rejoinder is that Fox is a news organization protected by the First Amendment's freedom of the press. Its reporters, guests, and hosts have every right to speculate about the effects of this and every other major news topic.

This is so obvious that the case should never see the light of day. Nobody is alleging libel or defamation, nor is anyone claiming a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the statements on Fox and the WASHLITE members contraction of COVID-19. Aside from such limited circumstances, media outlets and their employees have a right to be wrong. Supreme Court precedent (Snyder v. Phelps, 2011) rightly holds that media outlets cannot be liable for such, even if their reporting directly causes emotional distress. This is basic Civics 101.

Nonetheless, WASHLITE claims broadcasters have narrower First Amendment protections than print outlets and that programmers for broadcasters or cable operators (which is how it characterizes Fox News) enjoy almost no press protections at all. That first claim is technically true on matters such as putting obscenity on public airwaves, but even then, only mildly narrower. The second claim, for the issue here, is nonsense.

One need not read far into WASHLITEs court filings to find the first huge flaw in their bizarrely concocted theory.

They write that the Supreme Court has long recognized that cable programmers do not have First Amendment rights on the cable medium. This is poppycock. To support this claim, they cite a supposedly supporting opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, William Rehnquist, and Antonin Scalia in the 1996 case of Denver Area Ed. Telecommunications Consortium v. FCC. Denver Area was a fractured decision, with partial concurrences and partial dissents filed by multiple justices. The part of Thomass decision they cite is the losing position, in which Thomas and his two colleagues dissented from the majority opinion.

And even there, the three conservative justices were not saying anything close to the blanket statement that programmers do not have First Amendment rights. Instead, the justices argued that the First Amendment rights of networks such as Fox do not allow them to force cable companies such as Comcast to carry all their programming. At issue wasnt whether Fox is a media outlet whose expression is protected, but instead a technical matter in communications law known as a must carry provision.

In sum, WASHLITEs filing is off-target right from the start.

Brian McDonald, a judge in the Washington state Superior Court for King County, should dismiss WASHLITEs suit as a vile piece of nuisance, nakedly at odds with the First Amendment that is so essential to American constitutionalism. The group isnt pushing something light as in sunshine, but rather light as in featherweight, easily and deservedly puffed away.

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Lawsuit blaming Fox News for coronavirus is a threat to press freedom - Washington Examiner