James Freeman:Palin, Fake News and the Times Will the famously skeptical Judge Rakoff accept the ‘Oops’ defense?
In the June editorial, which followed the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise and others, the Times recycled a bogus claim that Mrs. Palin had incited Jared Lee Loughner to shoot Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011. The false allegation hinged on the publication of a map targeting swing congressional districts that was published by a political organization tied to Mrs. Palin. The smear had been debunked years ago—including in the pages of the New York Times. There was no evidence that Loughner had ever even seen the map.
The day after the editorial first appeared online in June, the Times posted a correction saying that it had “incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.”
As for the Times’ publication of the initial flawed story, to win her case Mrs. Palin will need to prove “actual malice” on the part of Times staff, meaning they knew the story to be false or they published with reckless disregard for the truth. This is a very high legal bar, as it should be. When people enter the political arena, they should expect that a free press will vigorously seek to hold them to account.
The Times had several options in mounting a defense. Two months ago Callum Borchers described a few of them in the Washington Post. Perhaps the most obvious was to argue that Times writers had mistakenly consulted initial false media accounts from 2011. “The Times could argue that its editorial writers were aware of these reports but, in their rush to publish quickly after the shooting of Scalise, committed an honest oversight and missed the follow-up reports — including the ones in their own paper — that debunked the notion of a link between Palin’s committee and Loughner,” wrote Mr. Borchers. He further described other potential defenses:
The Times also might contend that, although it got the particulars wrong, it was right to say that the map produced by Palin’s committee contributed generally to a toxic political climate that many people believe makes violence more likely….
Alternatively — and despite the correction — the Times could argue that the factors which motivated Loughner are matters of opinion, not fact, and that an opinion of what inspired the shooting is protected free speech, however dubious the conclusion.
But now along comes another argument from the defendant. Last week, the New York Times reported:
The editor of The New York Times editorial page testified on Wednesday that he did not intend in an editorial to blame the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin for a 2011 mass shooting, but was instead trying to make a point about the heated political environment. The editorial is the focus of a defamation lawsuit brought by Ms. Palin against the news organization.
The editor, James Bennet, said he had wanted to draw a link between charged political rhetoric and an atmosphere of political incitement after a gunman opened fired in June on a baseball field where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. But Mr. Bennet said he was not trying to make a direct connection between a map of targeted electoral districts that Ms. Palin’s political action committee had circulated and the 2011 shooting in Arizona by Jared Loughner that severely injured Representative Gabby Giffords. CONTINUE AT SITE
Comments are closed.
