How was that harassment? They directed a baseless smear campaign which posed a significant risk to Dominion’s business. Unless we’re defining “harassment” as “accountability”, that seems fair.
I think the more important aspect is that both of these were cases where someone knowingly promulgated false information fully aware that their story was not supported by the facts. Real journalists don’t tend to do that both because it’s unethical and because it can be financially ruinous.
The situation is different in cases where the truth isn’t clear or where supporting evidence turns out to be fake because in those cases a real journalistic organization will retract or update their story. Had either of them been willing to do so, they almost certainly wouldn’t have even been sued. The Sandy Hook settlement was so large because it was obvious that Jones simply wasn’t going to leave the victims alone.
Which wasn't the statements made by employees of Fox News. Perhaps if they had made such a statement they wouldn't have paid out several tons of money.
First, that’s not the same as what fox news alleged - if they’d simply run a “hacker x reported being able to alter the software” story they’d have been in the clear legally.
Second, elections are systems, not individual voting machines. Someone being able to tamper with unlimited physical access is not the same as being able to do so in an actual election (e.g. your bank’s PC probably aren’t perfect either but you can’t just sit down and start hacking them), and that’s only a small part of the actual system - as a simple example, if someone could make it record a vote for a different candidate than you tapped, it’d be caught by your review of the paper ballot which is actually counted. If they messed with the counting system, a hand recount would show huge discrepancies.
The underlying thing to remember here is that nobody seriously believed there was a problem. They started backwards from the desire to pretend Trump didn’t lose and repeated conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory as needed to say that outcome was real. That’s why they lost the lawsuit because it was clear that it was essentially political advertising pretending to be news, with complete disregard for the truth. That also forced the lawsuit since left unchallenged the smear campaign would have harmed Dominion’s business, whereas if there’d been anything factual the company would have been compelled to fix a real problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox...