This Palin defamation case is very stupid but it could potentially change journalism and our commitment to the first amendment if a jury finds in her favor:
Attorneys for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Thursday argued there was “no link” between their client and a 2011 shooting that left six people dead and an Arizona congresswoman injured, laying out their opening argument in Palin’s long-running libel lawsuit against the New York Times.
Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, filed the lawsuit against the New York Times in 2017 over an editorial that falsely linked her political activities to a 2011 shooting in Tuscon, Ariz., targeting then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). The editorial erroneously linked Palin’s political action committee, which had distributed a map of electoral targets that placed rifle scope cross hairs over 20 Democrats’ districts, including Giffords’, with the attack.
The former governor’s trial had been scheduled to begin Jan. 24 but was postponed after Palin, who is not vaccinated against Covid-19, tested positive for the virus.
Palin’s attorney Shane Vogt told the Manhattan federal courtroom in opening statements that his team intended to prove that James Bennet, the former editorial editor at the New York Times, recklessly published the editorial and that the piece included false and damaging statements about Palin.
“There was no link established between Governor Palin and that shooting,” Vogt said. “There was no link that demonstrated that Governor Palin was responsible for the death of six people.”
In opening statements, both the plaintiff and defense lawyers addressed the correction issued by the New York Times on the editorial that said it “incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.”
An attorney for the Times and Bennet, David Axelrod, said that after realizing readers assumed, because of the editorial, that the 2017 congressional baseball shooter acted because of the map, Bennet and the paper issued a correction.
“As soon as he realized how some people were understanding that editorial, the Times recognized it made a mistake and immediately began the correction process,” he said.
The defense argued in its opening statement that the purpose of the editorial was to address “inflammatory rhetoric” and gun policy.
“Bennet and the [editorial] board were especially conscious of not writing a one-sided piece,” Axelrod said. “The goal is to hold both political parties accountable, the political left and the political right, they are both responsible for inflammatory rhetoric unnecessarily demonizing the political enemies.”
This is a very trivial case but it’s clearly being bank-rolled by right wing legal actors for their own purposes. But I have to wonder if they’ve thought this through? When it comes to lying and defaming, it’s the right wing media that’s going to be at most risk from lawsuits if this case becomes precedent. That’s their entire business model. Do they not realize this?