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.
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