Palin’s defamation suit dismissed
AFEDERAL judge on Tuesday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin against the New York Times, saying Palin’s complaint failed to show that a mistake in an editorial was made maliciously.
“What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs Palin that are very rapidly corrected,” Judge Jed S Rakoff of US District Court in Manhattan said in his ruling. “Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”
In the lawsuit, which was filed in June, Palin contended that a Times editorial that was published roughly two weeks earlier had linked her to a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona even though the news organisation knew the connection was false. The editorial was published the day a gunman opened fire at a baseball field where congressmen were practising for an annual charity game.
The editorial suggested a connection between a map of targeted electoral districts circulated by Palin’s political action committee and the 2011 mass shooting by Jared Loughner that severely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. The Times later issued a correction, saying there was no link between political rhetoric and the shooting.
Palin said in the lawsuit that the editorial contradicted other articles in the Times that dismissed the idea that political rhetoric had incited the rampage. “The Times had ample facts available that established that there was no connection between Mrs Palin and Loughner’s crime,” she said.
The Times filed a motion to dismiss the case in July.
Earlier this month, Rakoff had ordered the author of the editorial to testify in an unusual evidentiary hearing, saying a central question he would consider when weighing the Times’s motion was whether Palin’s defamation complaint contained “sufficient allegations of actual malice”.
The “actual malice” standard for defamation holds that public offi- cials have to show that news outlets knowingly published false information or had acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth.
James Bennet, the editor of the Times editorial page, testified on August 16 that he had not intended to blame Palin for the 2011 shooting. Instead, he said, he was trying to make a point about the heated political environment.
In his ruling, Rakoff said that the behaviour of Bennet, who introduced the statements in question during the editing process, was “much more plausibly consistent with making an unintended mistake and then cor- recting it than with acting with actual malice”.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Times said: “Judge Rakoff’s opinion is an important reminder of the country’s deep commitment to a free press and the important role that journalism plays in our democracy. We regret the errors we made in the editorial. But we were pleased to see that the court acknowledged the importance of the prompt correction we made once we learned of the mistakes.”
Lawyers for Palin did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.