Palin loses libel suit against
What happened
A jury rejected Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times this week, dealing a major setback to conservatives who want to make it easier for public figures to take news outlets to court. The case stemmed from a 2017 editorial in which the Times linked a map distributed by the 2008 vice presidential candidate’s political action committee, showing stylized crosshairs over 20 Democratic congressional districts, to the attempted assassination of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords. There was no evidence that the gunman who targeted Giffords and ended up killing six other people was inspired by that map, and the Times published a correction the next morning. James Bennet, the then–editorial page editor who inserted the claim, testified that he’s thought about his “terrible mistake” almost every day since.
During the jury’s three-day deliberations, Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that Palin failed to demonstrate that the Times acted with the recklessness and malice needed for her to prevail. But Rakoff let the jurors reach their own verdict, should an appellate court wish to consider it. Rakoff’s decision to dismiss the case before the jury reached a verdict—saying that delaying that announcement would be “unfair to both sides”—drew scrutiny after several jurors said they saw news of the ruling on their smartphones while they were still deliberating. After weeks of testimony about the inner workings at the Times, the newspaper still celebrated the verdict, which Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien said marked “a good day for the free press.”
“Palin needed evidence—preferably in email form—that Bennet was eager to nail Palin with something he knew was false: an ‘actual malice’ smoking gun,” said Erik Wemple in The Washington Post. Instead, emails revealed Bennet asking a colleague to “please take a look” at the claim before publication, then rushing at
5 a.m. to correct the error. A free press can’t survive if every honest mistake about a well-funded person brings “crippling litigation.”
“This was no heroic stand for a free press,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. The Times showed “it was merely incompetent, not malicious.” That doesn’t meet the libel standard, but it’s “more than a misstated fact or two.” Bennet jammed in a falsehood about Palin to argue that it was Republicans who were inciting violence, after a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire on GOP members of Congress. That grotesque leap of logic provides “a cautionary tale of how politically congenial narratives can lead us astray.”
Though Palin’s expected appeal “will almost certainly lose,” said Eugene Volokh in Reason, the Supreme Court might still be looking for a chance to roll back 1964’s New York Times v. Sullivan, which set the “actual malice” standard for libel in cases brought by public figures. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch expressed interest in doing that recently, as did liberal Justice Elena Kagan before she joined the bench. Still, if that precedent falls, this won’t be the case that knocks it down.