Palin failin’ to beat NYT

Sarah Palin’s defamation case against The New York Times was tossed Tuesday, with a Manhattan federal judge ruling that the former Alaska governor failed to prove the Gray Lady intended to do her harm.

“Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not,” Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in a 25-page opinion.

He dismissed Palin’s lawsuit “with prejudice,” meaning that the former vice-presidential candidate is barred from refiling the case in his court.

“Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States,’’ Rakoff wrote. “In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be made, some of which will be hurtful to others.

“But if political journal- ism is to achieve its constitutionally endorsed role of challenging the powerful, legal redress by a public figure must be limited.’’

Palin (above) sued the Times over an editorial in June that linked her to a 2011 mass shooting that severely wounded Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six people.

The editorial, about the June shooting at a GOP congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Va., accused a Palin politicalaction committee’s ad of having incited the 2011 Arizona shooting, noting it had placed “Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

No evidence ever emerged to show that the Arizona gunman was inspired by the ad.

Rakoff found that Palin failed to prove anyone at the Times wrote the editorial with malice, which is the legal standard for proving defamation.

The judge cited testimony earlier this month from Times editorial-page editor James Bennet, who took responsibility for the error but insisted it was an honest mistake.

“Such behavior is much more plausibly consistent with making an unintended mistake and then correcting it than with acting with actual malice,” Rakoff said of the paper’s moves to correct its error.