The Sandman atory was not truthful in reporting. But there is no record that CNN knew it wasn't the truth or had strong doubts and still ran with it. No one is saying they're not biased. The saw a kid with a MAGA hat. Looked as if he was being hateful towards an old Native American man, then ran with it. But there's no texts, emails, phone calls showing their producers knew the whole story, believed the whole story, and still went after the kid. It was wrong. It was biased. But it wasn't the same thing.
As far as Maddow, she's opinionated and biased. What killed Fox in the lawsuit is they could see that the producers of the shows and, in some cases the hosts themselves, didn't believe what they were airing as truth. If they didn't have those texts and emails, they wouldn't have a had a case. It would have been just shotty reporting like CNN.
What I'm seeing over and over is conservatives can't figure out that the lawsuit was not claiming Fox was biased towards Dominion or even almost ruined their business. It's that they knew by their own admission that there was little truth to what the people they were propping up as giving them "breaking news" were saying. If Dominion couldn't prove that, there was no case no matter what Fox reported that was not factual. Sandman had a much easier case because he's not a corporation or a well known figure.