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Judge dismisses Sarah Palin's lawsuit against New York Times

by Tom Kludt

A federal judge in Manhattan on Tuesday dismissed Sarah Palin's defamation lawsuit against the New York Times.

"Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States," Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in an opinion dismissing the case. "In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be made, some of which will be hurtful to others."

The former vice presidential candidate sued the newspaper earlier this summer over an editorial that drew a link between an advertisement from Palin's political action committee and a 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, in which six people were killed and then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely wounded.

In the editorial, which was published online the day of the shooting at a congressional baseball practice this June, the editorial board suggested that Jared Lee Loughner, the man who carried out the Tucson massacre, was incited by a map from Palin's PAC's ad, which placed crosshairs over the congressional districts of several Democratic lawmakers, including Giffords'.

There is, in fact, no evidence that Loughner even saw the map, much less that he was motivated by it. The Times issued a correction the next day, but Palin filed her suit two weeks later.

Although it owned up to its error, the Times vowed to fight the case, asserting that the First Amendment protects its writers in such cases. Palin's attorneys argued that James Bennet, the editorial page editor who wrote the offending language in the piece, had displayed a reckless disregard of the facts, and claimed that the Times had an economic incentive to invoke Palin's name for clicks. In a motion to dismiss the case, lawyers for the Times called this premise implausible.

On Tuesday, Rakoff ruled in favor of that motion.

"Responsible journals will promptly correct their errors; others will not," Rakoff wrote. "But if political journalism is to achieve its constitutionally endorsed role of challenging the powerful, legal redress by a public figure must be limited to those cases where the public figure has a plausible factual basis for complaining that the mistake was made maliciously, that is, with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard of its falsity. Here, plaintiff's complaint, even when supplemented by facts developed at an evidentiary hearing convened by the Court, fails to make that showing."

Lawyers for Palin and the Times have not yet provided comment.