"A federal judge said on Friday that there was enough evidence in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times Company to send it to a jury trial..."

The NYT reports.

The suit, filed in June 2017, is centered on a Times editorial published that month under the headline "America’s Lethal Politics." In her complaint, Ms. Palin said the newspaper’s editorial board had wrongly and intentionally linked her to a 2011 mass shooting in which Gabrielle Giffords, a congresswoman from Arizona, was severely wounded and six people were killed...

The judge, Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, dismissed Ms. Palin’s suit two months after it was filed, saying of the mistaken editorial: "Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not." Last year, a three-judge panel overturned that decision and reinstated the case. On Friday, weeks after lawyers for Ms. Palin and The Times made arguments at a hearing, Judge Rakoff denied a Times motion for summary judgment. In ordering the case to proceed, he said there was "sufficient evidence to allow a rational finder of fact to find actual malice by clear and convincing evidence."...

The editorial, as it was first published, argued that 'the link to political incitement was clear' in the 2011 shooting. It also suggested a connection between a map circulated by Ms. Palin’s political action committee and the shooting. The map showed 20 targeted electoral districts held by Democrats, including Ms. Giffords’s seat, under stylized cross hairs...

The disputed material had been added to the editorial by James Bennet, the editorial page editor at the time. The outcome of the case rests on whether he behaved with "actual malice," meaning that he knew what he wrote was false, or acted out of "reckless disregard" for the truth. ...

Mr. Bennet resigned from The Times in June, after the publication of an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, that called for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

Palin needs to prove that it's clear that there was actual malice in saying that the connection between Palin and the shooting of Gifford was clear. It's clear that the connection was not clear, but for Palin to win, it needs to be clear that Bennet knew it was not clear or recklessly disregarded whether it was clear. What the trial judge said was that the question whether it was clear that Bennet knew or recklessly disregarded whether it was clear is unclear enough that a rational jury could find that it was clear.

Is that clear?!

Isn't it interesting to see Bennet in the center of things again? Here's what I wrote last June about the problem with what Cotton had written:

[Cotton wrote about] "left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes," but the NYT has not yet reported that the violent element was antifa. Its news story on June 1 had said "conservative commentators are asserting with little evidence that antifa, the far-left anti-fascism activist movement coordinates the riots and looting."

I was bothered at the time — and I'm still bothered today — that there isn't "more reporting in the NYT about who's responsible for the violence and disorder accompanying the protests." I continue to feel that the NYT is "not pursuing it or they are suppressing what they have because it impugns the left." By comparison, the Times was ridiculously eager to see a connection between a conservative — Sarah Palin — and one sudden act of violence.

Perhaps Bennet, in approving what Cotton had written, was thinking of balancing out the NYT tendency to blame conservatives for violence, which is what got the Times in trouble and made it vulnerable to Palin's lawsuit. But letting Cotton blame left-wingers for violence sparked internal dissension at the New York Times, and Bennet got booted out.

What's going on at The Wall Street Journal?

I'm reading "A Note to Readers/These pages won’t wilt under cancel-culture pressure" on the editorial page (boldface added):

We've been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages.

There's not link to the letter, so we have to infer what it says (or go looking for it, which I will do in a minute).

But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.

In the spirit of collegiality, we won't respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren't our responsibility in any case.

Good! Nice professional distancing.

The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.

That's how it should work.

It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution.

So the letter is an exemplar of "progressive cancel culture" — signed by people who work at The Wall Street Journal but don't understand or don't wish to follow its professionalism.

But we are not the New York Times.

Oh! A short hard punch at The New York Times.

Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today's media.

The NYT was singled out, but the rest of new media were attacked with even less respect, namelessly.

As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.

Nice!

I found the text of the letter easily:

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that nearly 300 WSJ staffers signed a letter to the publisher pointing out flaws and errors in Opinion articles and asking for changes. https://t.co/TFOX3KdzOR

Below: The letter in full. pic.twitter.com/v6hZvDcXl3

— marc tracy (@marcatracy) July 23, 2020

And here's Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair, "“I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS”: WALL STREET JOURNAL STAFF ERUPTS OVER RACE AND OPINION/Reporters and editors are pressing management on newsroom diversity, coverage of race and inequality, and the accuracy of Opinion pieces—including Mike Pence’s recent contribution. As one predicts, 'this is not the end'":

Various Journal staffers I spoke with all made a point of noting that the latest letter to management is different than what’s been going on at the New York Times, where a series of convulsions involving its Opinion pages—culminating in a problematic Tom Cotton op-ed that advocated for sending in federal troops to contain protests—recently led to the ouster of editorial page editor James Bennet. “My takeaway,” one of them said, “is that I’m really happy and impressed our staff has remained so sane compared to the rest of media right now. I was worried a letter on the Opinion stuff would turn into something like the New York Times, where anyone with a conservative thought is awful and should be silenced. But the letter made clear how we respect diversity of views and don’t want to tell Opinion how to run their shop.”

Another journalist at the paper said, “It definitely feels like there’s sort of a moment right now where management is a little more open to hearing concerns. There’s more of a window to make asks for things.” And as a third pointed out, “I suspect this is not the end.”

"'Now there’s an IQ test,' said another prominent Hamptons media figure. 'I’d have to be insane to let you quote me.'"

From "Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses/Those who can afford it left the city, shining a spotlight on class divisions in the media" (NYT).

Were media leaders in the right place to cover the horror of the early days of the outbreak, when they weren’t being kept awake by sirens? And did they overplay the violent fringes of protests, when they’ve been overwhelmingly peaceful and the city’s broader mood has been a kind of revolutionary good cheer? Walking with a television executive past boutiques on Newtown Lane in East Hampton last week, I tried to convince him that his teenage children would be fine walking around their native Upper East Side unaccompanied. During the protests, the city could look terrifying on television, and reporters on the scene faced violence, mostly from police; but the mood away from the police billy clubs was not exactly the Reign of Terror. (Though stay tuned: When The New York Times forced out the opinion editor James Bennet over a controversial column a week ago, two employees reacted in Slack with a slackmoji of the word “guillotine,” prompting internal complaints, a Times reporter said. “We encourage constructive, honest dialogue among our colleagues but there are lines that can be crossed, and this was one of them,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said in response.)

"There is little or no liberal space in this revolutionary movement for genuine, respectful disagreement, regardless of one’s identity, or even open-minded exploration."

"In fact, there is an increasingly ferocious campaign to quell dissent, to chill debate, to purge those who ask questions, and to ruin people for their refusal to swallow this reductionist ideology whole. The orthodoxy goes further than suppressing contrary arguments and shaming any human being who makes them. It insists, in fact, that anything counter to this view is itself a form of violence against the oppressed. The reason some New York Times staffers defenestrated op-ed page editor James Bennet was that he was, they claimed, endangering the lives of black staffers by running a piece by Senator Tom Cotton, who called for federal troops to end looting, violence, and chaos, if the local authorities could not. This framing equated words on a page with a threat to physical life — the precise argument many students at elite colleges have been using to protect themselves from views that might upset them.... In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. 'White Silence = Violence' is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae.... If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of 'white fragility.' If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile. It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones...."

From "Is There Still Room for Debate?" by Andrew Sullivan (New York Magazine).

"Appreciate the article but the sanitizing and glossing over of the serious crimes including assaulting a pregnant woman with a gun does a disservice to reporting reality."

"He need not be perfect for all of us to mourn and demand change but by manipulating the life story we lose the ability to educate many who don’t see the problem as they focus on the spin versus the real story - his murder."

The second-highest-rated comment at "George Floyd, From ‘I Want to Touch the World’ to ‘I Can’t Breathe’/Mr. Floyd had big plans for life nearly 30 years ago. His death in police custody is powering a movement against police brutality and racial injustice" (NYT).

Also highly rated: "I am confused. I believe the autopsy report said he was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine. This seems relevant to the full picture yet is not mentioned in the meticulously researched article."

I've read the NYT for more than 50 years, and I don't believe I have another option for reading a real newspaper here in America. I've always been looking out for the propaganda. In fact, I was taught to that by my high school history teacher, whose class included required daily reading of the NYT. After the ousting of James Bennet a few days ago, you would think the NYT would feel extra pressure to show that it will pursue high journalistic principles and not skew things to please the people who are demanding propaganda. I can't say I'm surprised to see this sanitized portrait of George Floyd, but I want to go on record saying that this is bad.

And it's bad not only as bad journalism, but it's bad on the subject of police brutality. It doesn't matter that the man who died had big dreams of the future or professional-level athletic ability. The police shouldn't be executing anybody.

"Seeing the brutality of a white power structure toward its poor black citizens [on the streets of Ferguson], and at its rawest, helped shape the way a generation of reporters..."

"... most of them black, looked at their jobs when they returned to their newsrooms. And by 2014... Twitter...  offered a counterweight to their newsrooms, which over the years had sought to hire black reporters on the unspoken condition that they bite their tongues about racism. Now, as America is wrestling with the surging of a moment that began in August 2014, its biggest newsrooms are trying to find common ground between a tradition that aims to persuade the widest possible audience that its reporting is neutral and journalists who believe that fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.... The fights at The Times are particularly intense because Mr. Sulzberger is now considering candidates to replace the executive editor, Dean Baquet, in 2022, the year he turns 66. Competing candidates represent different visions for the paper, and Mr. Bennet had embodied a particular kind of ecumenical establishment politics. But the Cotton debacle had clearly endangered Mr. Bennet’s future. When the highly regarded Sunday Business editor, Nick Summers, said in a Google Hangout meeting last Thursday that he wouldn’t work for Mr. Bennet, he drew agreement from colleagues in a chat window.... Mr. Sulzberger... told me... 'We’re not retreating from the principles of independence and objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective about things like human rights and racism.'"

Writes Ben Smith in "Inside the Revolts Erupting in America’s Big Newsrooms/Staff members’ demands helped end the tenure of James Bennet as Opinion editor of The New York Times. And they are generating tension at The Washington Post. Part of the story starts in Ferguson, Mo." (NYT).

We’re not retreating from the principles of... objectivity. We don’t pretend to be objective....

"The New York Times announced Sunday that Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is resigning — amid reports of anger inside the company over the publication of an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton..."

"... about the George Floyd unrest last week. Bennet, the brother of 2020 White House candidate Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., had apologized late last week after previously defending the piece, titled, 'Send in the Troops.' Cotton, R-Ark., called for the government to deploy troops as a last resort to help quell riots and looting that emerged amid the anger over Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody last month. The publication sparked a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called out sick Thursday in protest, and the Times later announced that a review found the piece did not meet its standards.... 'Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we've experienced in recent years,' [Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger wrote]. 'James and I agreed that it would take a new team to lead the department through a period of considerable change.'"

Fox News reports.

ADDED: NYT writer Bari Weiss has some very useful commentary at Twitter:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same.  The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption. The New Guard has a different worldview, one articulated best by @JonHaidt and @glukianoff. They call it "safetyism," in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech.

It's interesting that people who made safety so overwhelmingly important would accept rioting and vehemently oppose government's protecting citizens from the forces of chaos.

The NYT bows: "In an embarrassing about-face, The New York Times said Thursday that an opinion piece it ran by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton... did not meet its standards."

"Cotton’s op-ed, titled 'Send in the Troops' and first posted online late Wednesday, caused a revolt among Times journalists, with some saying it endangered black employees. Some staff members called in sick Thursday in protest. The Times said in a statement that a 'rushed editorial process' led to publication of a piece that did not meet its standards.... Earlier Thursday, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editorial page editor James Bennet defended its publication, saying they believed it was important to discuss controversial ideas in a public forum rather than keep them quiet. But, the Times reported that later, Bennet revealed that he had not read Cotton’s piece prior to its publication. 'As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes' to its opinion pages including expanding its fact-checking operation and reducing the number of op-eds, which are opinion pieces written by outside contributors that it publishes, the Times said [in] its statement.... Also Thursday, the Philadelphia Inquirer apologized for a 'horribly wrong' decision to use the headline 'Buildings Matter, Too' on an article. Some 30 members of its 210-member editorial staff had called in sick Thursday following the mistake, which black staff members angrily condemned...."

AP reports.

Cotton reacted, saying the NYT is "surrendering to the mindless woke mob."

A particular problem with Cotton's piece was that it spoke of "left-wing radicals like antifa infiltrating protest marches to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anarchic purposes," but the NYT has not yet reported that the violent element was antifa. Its news story on June 1 had said "conservative commentators are asserting with little evidence that antifa, the far-left anti-fascism activist movement coordinates the riots and looting."

Whether Cotton was right or wrong about the facts, there is a problem with factual assertions in op-eds. I've written op-eds for the NYT, and it was with a very short deadline and I was trusted to get the facts in order. I don't know how much the Times intends to change its process, but I assume it wants and needs to have some distance between itself and the writers it brings in from the outside to give a hot take on a breaking controversial story.

ADDED: Why isn't there more reporting in the NYT about who's responsible for the violence and disorder accompanying the protests? A rational inference is that they are not pursuing it or they are suppressing what they have because it impugns the left. Please rebut that presumption if it's wrong, NYT.