A jury on Tuesday shot down Sarah Palin’s second bid against The New York Times, almost eight years after the former Alaska governor first filed her complaint.
The verdict came less than a week after the trial began and two years after she lost her first case against the paper. A retrial was triggered in August after a federal appeals court found that Judge Jed Rakoff, who also presided over this month’s proceedings, had improperly dismissed the case.
“We want to thank the jurors for their careful deliberations. The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes,” a Times spokesperson said in a statement.
Representatives for Palin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the former governor took to X shortly after the ruling to lament her loss in court.
“But please keep fighting for integrity in media,” she wrote. “I’ll keep asking the press to quit making things up.”
The retrial’s outcome comes as little surprise, however, given both Rakoff and a federal jury ruled against Palin the first time around. Still, the media landscape has changed over the past few years as trust in media has declined, setting up a situation that was potentially less favorable to the Times.
Palin first filed her lawsuit against the Times and former editor James Bennet in June 2017 after the paper ran an editorial alleging Palin had engaged in “political incitement” ahead of the 2011 shooting of Gabby Giffords. According to Palin’s lawsuit, the editorial incorrectly claimed an advertisement run by the former governor’s political action committee placed “Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
The Times released a correction less than 24 hours later, clarifying that “no such link was established” but noting that the error did not “undercut or weaken the argument of the piece.”
The Times’ Tuesday victory comes as news publishers have increasingly been the target of legal attacks.
Other than the Trump administration’s legal moves against publishers, some conservatives have in recent years taken aim at Times v Sullivan, the landmark 1964 ruling that has for decades protected media outlets from defamation lawsuits from public figures. Conservatives initially hailed Palin’s renewed effort for being an entry point into dismantling the ruling, though those hopes were quickly quashed by the Second Circuit Court, which found Palin had waived her rights to challenge the actual malice standard after she waited too long to make that argument.
In fending off Palin’s renewed legal assault during a time when the government and the president have shown themselves to be unfavorable toward the press, the Times exemplified the merits of standing by its work and corrections at a time when reporters are being labeled enemies of the people.
This story has been updated with additional information and context.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the day the jury reached a verdict. It was Tuesday.
Read the full article here