That was a bit weird for the US system though. There is the obvious element that topical cable news political reporting is nearly wall-to-wall misinformation and it is often hard to tell if it was the politicians or the news operations that were most responsible. They've already hit an equilibrium where everyone appears to be doing their best to be wilfully stupid to obscure whether they are lying or just that dumb.
For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.
>For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue
This is a confusion. The Dominion corporation was defamed and brought the suit. The government generally has no standing in these suits and cannot bring them itself.
It sounds like you think undermining confidence in voting is a net good. Do you have a reason for this?
Dominion Voting Systems Corporation sued Fox News for defamation and then Fox News settled for nearly $800M before the case got to trial. Why do you say the legal system singled out Dominion here?
Presumably they settled because they expected to lose the case and expected to be found liable for around a billion dollars in damages. Fair enough.
But stirring up an insane unfounded panic about electronic voting security would be one of the most productive things the US cable news have done in the last 20-40 years. It is one of the best aspects of a democratic system to be paranoid about; something goes wrong there and it probably isn't recoverable. And for US corporate news it is much more in character to be up on stage strategically ignoring how every other war turned out terribly while mumbling sweet nothings about how good the next one will turn out and how justified this new one is unlike all the others.
The danger (which we've seen play out) is that this gets used as a pretext to ignore unfavorable election results, and then all those objections are forgotten when the election results are favorable. This "panic" had no intention of improving anything, nor did it.
For the legal system to single out the Dominion Voting thing as an issue was ... acceptable but probably a misfire. Of all the craziness, hysterics targeting voting machines was the issue most likely to accidentally be a net good for the US system.