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Ruth King

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Park Service’s Botched Bottle Ban Obama’s behavioral economists must have been on vacation.

By on August 25th, 2017

Vacationers can now buy bottled water in national parks, after the Trump Administration this month ended an Obama-era policy that sought to reduce plastic waste. Environmentalists responded with predictable outrage, but reversing the ban is healthier and greener.

Bottled water has increasingly dominated the nonalcoholic beverage market, surpassing soda this year. In this trend the Obama Administration saw a teachable moment. In a 2011 memo on sustainability, the National Park Service claimed that by reducing or prohibiting water sales and increasing its offerings of reusable bottles, it could “introduce visitors to green products and the concept of environmentally responsible purchasing, and give them the opportunity to take that environmental ethic home and apply it in their daily lives.”

More than 20 sites, including the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park, banned bottled water sales, and the Park Service spent millions on water fountains and filling stations.

But consumers have a way of thwarting paternalistic plans, and the Park Service failed to apply similar restrictions on soda or sports drinks. When the University of Vermont banned bottled water in 2013, researchers found that bottled beverage consumption did not decrease—and students quenched their thirst with sugary beverages instead of water. Carbonated beverages exert more pressure than water, requiring heavier bottles that use more plastic.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus also assessed a potential water bottle ban, building on findings from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency’s social cost of carbon. They concluded that “although it is widely believed that these bans are important for environmental reasons,” any benefits were minuscule.

The teachable moment turns out to be a lesson in the law of unintended consequences.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

J.P. Morgan’s Hate List What is its gift to the Southern Poverty Law Center telling bank customers? By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on August 25th, 2017

Corporate America will do almost anything to stay on the safe side of public opinion—at least as it’s defined by the media. CEOs will apologize, grovel, resign, settle. They will even, as of this month, legitimize and fund an outfit that exists to smear conservatives.

The press is still obsessing over President Trump’s incompetent handling of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and that has suited some profiteers just fine. The notorious Southern Poverty Law Center is quietly cashing in on the tragedy, raking in millions on its spun-up reputation as a group that “fights hate.” Apple CEO Tim Cook informed employees that his company is giving $1 million to SPLC and matching employee donations. J.P. Morgan Chase is pitching in $500,000, specifically to further the SPLC’s “work in tracking, exposing and fighting hate groups and other extremist organizations,” in the words of Peter Scher, the bank’s head of corporate responsibility.

What Mr. Scher is referring to is the SPLC’s “Hate Map,” its online list of 917 American “hate groups.” The SPLC alone decides who goes on the list, but its criteria are purposely vague. Since the SPLC is a far-left activist group, the map comes down to this: If the SPLC doesn’t agree with your views, it tags you as a hater.

Let’s not mince words: By funding this list, J.P. Morgan and Apple are saying they support labeling Christian organizations that oppose gay marriage as “hate groups.” That may come as a sour revelation to any bank customers who have donated to the Family Research Council (a mainstream Christian outfit on the SPLC’s list) or whose rights are protected by the Alliance Defending Freedom (which litigates for religious freedom and is also on the list).

Similarly put out may be iPhone owners who support the antiterror policies espoused by Frank Gaffney’s Washington think tank, the Center for Security Policy (on the SPLC’s list). Or any who back the proposals of the Center for Immigration Studies (on the list).

These corporations are presumably in favor of the SPLC’s practice of calling its political opponents “extremists,” which paints targets on their backs. The group’s “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” lists Mr. Gaffney (who worked for the Reagan administration); Maajid Nawaz (a British activist whose crimes include tweeting a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad ); and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali refugee who speaks out against Islamic extremism).

The SPLC has tarred the respected social scientist Charles Murray, author of the well-regarded book “Losing Ground,” as a “white nationalist.” Mr. Murray has been physically assaulted on campus as a result. He happens to be married to an Asian woman and has Asian daughters, so the slur is ludicrous. But what’s a little smearing and career destruction if J.P. Morgan Chase gets some good headlines?

It isn’t only the lists. An honest outfit tracking violent groups would keep to straightforward descriptions and facts. Instead, the SPLC’s descriptions of people are brutally partisan, full of half-truths and vitriol designed to inspire fury.

We’ve seen what this kind of fury can do in Europe, with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the controversial filmmaker, by a Dutch-Moroccan Islamic fanatic. Ms. Hirsi Ali, who had worked with Van Gogh, still travels with security—and J.P. Morgan thinks it appropriate to further target her? In 2012 a gay-marriage supporter named Floyd Corkins smashed into the Family Research Council’s headquarters and shot a security guard. He told police he was inspired by the SPLC’s “hate group” designation. CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Blank Check for Afghanistan? By Brandon J. Weichert|

By on August 24th, 2017

The trouble with the new (or, rather, not-so-new) Trump Administration war plan for Afghanistan is that it’s a loser. Sure, the president gets high marks for finally talking about “victory” in Afghanistan—after 17 years of seemingly endless warfare, it’s nice to hear the word mentioned. Yet, for all of the talk of victory, the president offered nothing new, at least strategically, that would achieve that goal.https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/24/blank-check-afghanistan/

Angelo Codevilla has also argued that we got nothing new from Trump on Afghanistan. At a tactical level, the president made much sense: we would no longer have the onerous rules of engagement that have prevented our gallant troops from fully bringing the hurt to our enemies. Battlefield commanders, not politicians in Washington, would have near-complete autonomy over the day-to-day course of the war. This is a refreshing change from the previous administration, which squandered Americans’ time, money, and lives in Afghanistan fighting simply to hold on, rather than win or withdraw. The restraining tactics of the Obama years were perfectly suited to a strategy of stalemate.

But do improved and sensible tactics automatically suggest a more sensible strategy? What is our strategy?

The best President Trump gave us was that “conditions on the ground,” rather than arbitrary time tables, would dictate the course of the war. Although sound policy, that remains a tactical rather than strategic consideration. And, really, this rhetoric sounds eerily reminiscent of George W. Bush and his “low energy” brother, Jeb!

To be clear, I am not an outright opponent of the plan, but I am a skeptic. For instance, supporters of the president’s plan argue that this rehash of the old plan is exactly what the president promised during the campaign. “Right now,” F. H. Buckley argues, “the principal breeding ground of Islamic jihadism is Afghanistan, not Syria, and Trump correctly concluded that the very best way to prevent another 9/11 is to continue the fight in that country. It’s just what he promised on the campaign trail.”

Respectfully, no, it is not.

First, people like myself supported what was once referred to as the “Counterterrorism-Plus” strategy advanced by that broken clock and former Vice President Joe Biden. This plan called for focusing on the counterterrorism, rather than on the counterinsurgency aspects of the war. Right now, President Trump’s plan sounds dreadfully similar to our current counterinsurgency effort—sending more forces (around 4,000 troops) to win the fickle hearts and minds of the Afghan people, thereby denying insurgents, such as the Taliban or al-Qaeda, recruits. This plan has never worked in Afghanistan. So, whether it’s 4,000 or 40,000 more troops, it’s still a bad plan. Some hearts can’t be won.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Liberals, Shipwrecked Democrat Mark Lilla seeks an alternative to identity politics, but it’s a lonely quest.

By on August 24th, 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla (Harper, 160 pp., $24.99)

In his new book, Columbia University humanities professor Mark Lilla laments the phrase “speaking as an X.” Ubiquitous in academia for years, but now increasingly prevalent in general discourse, it is an introductory clause that

sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned. So classroom conversations that once might have begun, I think A, and here is my argument, now take the form, Speaking as an X, I am offended that you claim B. This makes perfect sense if you believe that identity determines everything. It means there is no impartial space for dialogue.

The passage makes plain what Lilla is up to—and up against. He wants the Democratic Party to abandon identity politics for the sake of its electoral viability. Effecting beneficial changes requires wielding power, he argues, and in democracies, securing power requires winning elections. In America—vast, diverse, and unruly—such victories can be secured only through “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from [oneself] to join a common effort.” Lilla thus finds it necessary to instruct fellow Democrats that elections are neither prayer meetings nor therapy sessions nor seminars nor “teaching moments.”

What is identity politics? As a chapter epigraph, Lilla cites a statement from the Combahee River Collective, a 1970s group whose raison d’etre—black lesbians’ issues and perspectives were getting short shrift from existing civil rights, gay rights, and feminist organizations—sounds like a parody of the problem Lilla describes. “This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” the statement said. “We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.”

This rejection of the very idea of an impartial dialogue is, Lilla believes, how the noble legacy of “large classes of people—African-Americans, women—seeking to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and then working through our political institutions” gave way, by the 1980s, to “a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition.” Inherent in it is identitarians’ “disdain” for the “ordinary democratic politics” of “engaging with and persuading people unlike themselves” in favor of “delivering sermons to the unwashed from a raised pulpit.”

Rather than gratefully accept this enlightenment and path to redemption, however, the unwashed are likely to demand an identity politics of their own. “As soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity,” Lilla warns, “you invite your adversary to do the same.” Thus, Donald Trump’s victory and Lilla’s book, which grew out of a New York Times op-ed he wrote the week after the 2016 election. He was “sick and tired of noble defeats,” Lilla told interviewers then. Lilla’s article prompted many denunciations, the most venomous coming from a Columbia law professor who compared him, unfavorably, with David Duke.

Such reactions give strong reason to doubt that we will soon see a post- or anti-identity politics emerging the Democratic Party. And yet, an even stronger reason exists. The feasibility of Lilla’s project depends on the plausibility of his analysis. If identity politics is an affliction that happened to liberalism, as he sees it, then it’s realistic to activate Democratic antibodies to reject the pathogen. If, however, identity politics is a condition to which liberalism is inherently susceptible, or even disposed, then identity politics is not the Democrats’ problem but their destiny. Unfortunately for Lilla, the evidence points in this direction.

Something came between the New Deal Democratic Party, summoned to pride and patriotism by Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and today’s Democratic Party, micro-targeting so many distinct constituencies that, to Lilla, it seems better prepared to govern Lebanon than America. In between came McGovernism—not just George McGovern’s 1972 campaign but also the whole style and substance of 1960s and 1970s liberalism: from John F. Kennedy’s cool to Robert Kennedy’s zeal; from civil rights to Black Power; from the counterculture, New Left, and antiwar movements to feminism and environmentalism. The result, says Lilla, turned Joe Sixpack’s Democratic Party into Jessica Yogamat’s. Democrats uncritically embraced the constituencies and passions brought to the fore in the 1960s—often at the expense of common sense, political and governmental. In these years, Lilla writes, “liberals, fearful of ‘blaming the victim,’ refused to speak about the new culture of dependency, or about the tremendous rise in violent crime in the 1960s.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Fiber Yields to Cyber The famed Village Voice goes web-only. Clark Whelton

By on August 24th, 2017

Earlier this week the Village Voice—the weekly paper that gave me my start in the writing business—announced the end of its print edition. The paper that invented the counterculture will now live on the Internet alone.

Over the last half-century, digital technology has driven many publications into bankruptcy, or deported them to the cloud. But the sad fate of the Voice’s print edition has special irony: early computers played an accidental role in transforming a struggling neighborhood paper into what author Kevin McAuliffe called “the Great American Newspaper.”

On December 8, 1962, Local 6 of the International Typographical Union (ITU) called a strike against four New York City dailies; three others shut down in solidarity, effectively leaving New York without daily papers. Because it was the Christmas season, advertisers were desperate to find other outlets. Some of them discovered a thin Greenwich Village weekly called the Voice.

At first it looked like the strike would be resolved quickly and the Voice’s advertising gold rush would be temporary. But insiders knew the main issue was not salary or hours, or even job security. The real issue was automation.

Throughout the 1950s, Bert Powers, head of Local 6, had been following the steady development of automated typesetting. It was still a feeble technology, a whisper of things to come, but Powers could already see that automation was faster, cheaper, and easier to use. His union’s lumbering hot-type machines were direct descendants of Gutenberg’s fifteenth century printing press. If the new system was allowed into newsrooms and printing plants, ITU typesetters would lose their jobs. And so, in a kamikaze attack that wrecked the newspaper business in New York City, Powers kept the Local 6 picket lines up.

As the newspaper strike stretched into weeks, and the weeks to months, competitors grew fat on diverted ads. Radio and TV coverage expanded rapidly. New publications, such as the New York Review of Books, sprang to life. For the Village Voice, which had been balanced on the edge of insolvency for years, the long strike was a godsend to ad revenue and newsstand sales.

That the Voice had made it to 1963 was already something of a miracle. When they started the weekly in 1955, the paper’s three founders—Ed Fancher, Dan Wolf, and Norman Mailer—knew that Greenwich Village was an international symbol of cool. Since the early 1900s the neighborhood had been famous for creative oddballs, free thinkers, and sex: a reputation like that should be easy to market.

Trouble is, they had no idea how to publish a 12-page paper. Fortunately, their friend Jerry Tallmer had worked on the student paper at Dartmouth and knew the ropes. Tallmer came on board as associate editor and, along with writers like John Wilcock and photographer Fred McDarrah, helped the Voice build a small but loyal readership, at an attractive price—an annual subscription (52 issues) cost $3.00.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Terrorists and tiaras by Ruthie Blum

By on August 24th, 2017

It is hard to feel sorry for Lebanese-Swede Amanda Hanna, who was stripped ‎of her Miss Lebanon Emigrant 2017 title this week — some nine days after ‎being crowned in the annual expat beauty pageant — when it was discovered ‎that she had visited Israel last year as part of an academic tour.‎

Hanna, who expressed her gratitude on Facebook at having won the August 12 ‎finals, was declared unfit to fill the role of best-looking Lebanese expat in a ‎statement released by the organizers of the event, held in Dhour El Choueir. ‎‎”After communicating our decision with Lebanon’s minister of tourism,” the ‎communique read, “he decided that Hanna should be stripped of her title ‎because her visit to Israel violates our country’s laws.” ‎

Hanna should have known this was going to happen, and not only because ‎Lebanon is the Jewish state’s sworn enemy. Indeed, had she done her ‎homework, she would have learned that any contact with Israelis in Lebanon is ‎punishable by imprisonment. She also might have discovered that the movie ‎‎”Wonder Woman” was banned from its theaters because it stars Israeli actress ‎Gal Gadot. A simple Google search, too, would have revealed that Miss ‎Lebanon Saly Greige came under heavy fire two and half years ago for ‎appearing in a selfie with Miss Israel, Doron Matalon, during the Miss ‎Universe pageant in Miami. After Matalon posted the photo (of herself with ‎Miss Slovenia, Miss Japan and Greige) on Instagram, Greige was criticized ‎widely in her country for being a traitor. To defend herself against the ‎accusations, Greige said that she had been taking a photo with Miss Slovenia ‎and Miss Japan, when suddenly “Miss Israel jumped in.” ‎

It is not Hanna’s fault that Lebanon is one large base for the Shiite terrorist ‎organization Hezbollah. But it was her choice to participate in an event ‎sponsored by the powers-that-be in Beirut, who are not only evil in and of ‎themselves, but who enjoy warm relations with the regime in Tehran.‎

This makes perfect sense to anyone who has been paying attention, since ‎Hezbollah is the Islamic Republic of Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Furthermore, ‎Lebanese President Michel Aoun and his government, headed by Prime ‎Minister Saad Hariri, are openly pro-Hezbollah. In fact, Aoun met with Iranian ‎Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Jaberi Ansari ‎on Monday morning at the Baabda Palace in Beirut, and received an invitation ‎from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for an official visit to Tehran for the ‎purpose of enhancing their relationship. ‎

Iran’s burgeoning position next door to Lebanon, in Syria, was the focus of ‎Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trip to Russia this week. In a meeting with Russian ‎President Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Wednesday, ‎Netanyahu warned that he would take military action, if necessary, to prevent ‎Tehran from expanding its presence in Syria. Like Lebanon, Syria borders ‎Israel in the north. Hezbollah fighters, Shiite militias and Iranian Revolutionary ‎Guard Corps soldiers, who joined forces to safeguard the regime of Syrian ‎President Bashar Assad against Islamic State and other Sunni rebels — all of ‎whom also promote jihad against the Jews — pose a grave danger to the Jewish ‎state.‎

‎”We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to ‎annihilate Israel,” Netanyahu told Putin, who has been supporting Assad and ‎his Tehran-backed allies since 2015. “Israel opposes Iran’s continued ‎entrenchment in Syria. We will be sure to defend ourselves with all means ‎against this and any threat.”‎

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Putting an End to Government Funding of Islamism Extremist movements disguise their activities as schools or charities. By Sam Westrop

By on August 24th, 2017

In Tuesday’s speech, President Trump denounced the flow of U.S. money to Pakistan while that nation harbors terrorists. South Asian Islamism is an enormous problem, and yet a great deal of the discussion in America surrounding Islamism focuses on the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood. But the Muslim Brotherhood is far from the only Islamist network in the United States; it is simply the best known. Other Islamist movements also benefit from government ignorance about the diversity of Islam and Islamism across the globe. The South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), for instance, has received millions from the U.S. taxpayer for its powerful network of charities and welfare services, which are designed to obtain external funding as well as legitimize JI as a representative voice of Muslims, in both America and South Asia.

Although JI has its own ideologues, literature, and infrastructure, it is often described as the South Asian “cousin” of the Muslim Brotherhood. Qazi Ahmad Hussain, head of JI in Pakistan, has declared: “We consider ourselves as an integral part of the Brotherhood and the Islamic movement in Egypt. . . . Our nation is one.” JI’s history is bloody. During the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh, JI fighters helped Pakistani forces massacre hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis seeking independence from Pakistan. Several JI leaders guilty of these war crimes fled to the West, where they helped establish JI organizations that operated as community leadership groups. Two western JI leaders have since been sentenced to death in absentia for these killings by a UN-backed war-crimes tribunal.

One of those convicted, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, served as a leading official of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a prominent American Muslim organization. Twice a year, ICNA jointly hosts a conference with the Muslim American Society (MAS), a leading Muslim Brotherhood institution. Unsurprisingly, these conferences are filled with extremist preachers. Ahmed Taha, an ICNA-MAS official who organized their conference in December, has republished posts on social media stating: “O Muslim, O servant of God. There is a Jew behind me, come kill him.”

Despite its long history of extremism, in 2016 ICNA received $1.3 million of taxpayers’ money as part of a grant awarded by the Department of Homeland Security.

ICNA is not the only JI organization in America. Nor is it the only JI group to have received taxpayer funds. Behind ICNA and other front groups around the world, JI operates an enormous network of registered charities and community organizations. One of the most prominent is the Rural Education and Development (READ) Foundation.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Affirmative Action Has Failed. It Never Had a Chance to Succeed College admissions committees can’t repair the damage caused by family dissolution. By David French

By on August 24th, 2017

This morning the New York Times published an extraordinary, data-rich article examining the outcome of diversity efforts at colleges and universities from coast to coast. The results, quite frankly, are sobering.

After decades of affirmative action, billions of dollars invested in finding, mentoring, and recruiting minority students, and extraordinary levels of effort and experimentation, black and Hispanic students are “more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago” (emphasis added). White and Asian students, on the other hand, remain overrepresented as a percentage of the population, with Asian students most overrepresented of all.

On the one hand, these statistics represent a staggering failure. It’s difficult to overstate the modern campus obsession with diversity. To judge from marketing materials, campus investments, and the explosive growth of diversity bureaucracies, increasing minority representation on campus isn’t just a priority on par with, say, a good math, English, or engineering department, it’s deemed to be an indispensable part of a high-quality college education. That’s the legal rationale that’s used to justify racial discrimination in college admissions — that there is a “compelling state interest” in creating a truly diverse educational experience.

On the other hand, however, one wonders whether failure was inevitable. Not even the most aggressive of affirmative-action programs can find students who don’t exist. And when it comes to college admissions, the problem isn’t a lack of collegiate demand for qualified minority students but rather a serious deficiency in supply. There are simply not enough students who are ready, willing, and able to do the work.

That’s not to say that affirmative action is meaningless or irrelevant. Absent admissions preferences, the number of black and Hispanic students would decrease even further. It does mean, however, that educational disadvantages exist long before the college admissions process, and the college admissions process can’t come close to closing the gap. Here’s the Times:

Affirmative action increases the numbers of black and Hispanic students at many colleges and universities, but experts say that persistent underrepresentation often stems from equity issues that begin earlier.

Elementary and secondary schools with large numbers of black and Hispanic students are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, high-quality instructional materials and adequate facilities, according to the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Wait just a moment. There’s little doubt that these factors matter, but isn’t there a word missing from the Times’ summary of disadvantages? Isn’t it, quite possibly, the most important word? Yes, I’m thinking of “family.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

U.S. Officials Meet With Israeli, Palestinian Leaders in Bid to Revive Talks Benjamin Netanyahu’s office calls meeting ‘constructive and substantive,’ but details are scarce By Rory Jones

By on August 24th, 2017

TEL AVIV—White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and other U.S. officials on Thursday met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on the final leg of a Middle East diplomacy tour, as President Donald Trump attempts to revive dormant peace talks between the adversaries.

Mr. Kushner, who is also the president’s son-in-law, spoke first with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem before sitting down with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

The White House had indicated that it would present a strategy for negotiated peace to both sides Thursday. But details of such a plan weren’t immediately released following the meetings. Mr. Trump has made reaching peace between Israelis and Palestinians a key foreign policy priority, calling it the “ultimate deal.”

A brief statement from Mr. Netanyahu’s office called their meeting “constructive and substantive,” and expressed his appreciation to the Trump administration for its “strong support of Israel.” The Israeli leader looked forward to talking further with U.S. officials in the weeks ahead, it added.

“Things are difficult and complicated,” Mr. Abbas said in a statement released as he met with Mr. Kushner. “But nothing is impossible in the face of good efforts.”

Mr. Kushner was joined on the trip by Jason Greenblatt, the White House’s special representative for international negotiations, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser. The group also met with officials from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Jordan to discuss the peace process. It was unclear when the delegation would leave Israel.

Mr. Trump’s attempts to advance peace talks are unlikely to yield progress in the short term, according to Western diplomats and analysts.

Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government is reluctant to agree to enter negotiations for a Palestinian state that right-wing hawks believe will risk Israel’s security.

Palestinian officials, meanwhile, aren’t willing to enter peace talks that don’t entertain the notion of statehood.

“There are likely to be a lot of ups and downs on the way to peace and making a peace deal will take time,” a White House official said ahead of Thursday’s meetings.

Mr. Trump has shifted from the long-held U.S. policy of supporting a two-state solution to the conflict, saying he would instead support a solution on which both Israelis and Palestinians agree. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

James Freeman:Palin, Fake News and the Times Will the famously skeptical Judge Rakoff accept the ‘Oops’ defense?

By on August 24th, 2017

Is the New York Times botching its legal defense against Sarah Palin’s libel claim? In June the Times published an editorial containing fake news about the former Alaska governor and GOP vice-presidential candidate. Now the newspaper is seeking to have her lawsuit dismissed. But Mrs. Palin’s legal team says that Times lawyers are demanding a legal standard that would effectively make it impossible for any public official to win a libel case.

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

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