ANG

Takes 2nd shot at New York Times

Long out of the national public spotlight, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is back in it as she heads to court in New York City this week in an effort to make the New York Times pay for falsely accusing her of inciting a 2011 shooting that left six people dead and seriously wounded then-Rep. Gabby Giffords.

Palin has been here before, and she lost. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff in 2019 accepted the Times’ explanation that journalistic incompetence was to blame for the unsupported accusation the newspaper leveled against the one-time Republican candidate for vice-president.

Rakoff ruled that Palin had not produced the necessary evidence to prove the Times acted with malice in blaming her for the deaths and then dismissed the case. His action was a reflection of the high bar public officials and public figures must clear to satisfy a defamation claim against U.S. media.

“As, indisputably, a public figure, (Palin) must prove, before a New York jury, that the Times acted with ‘actual malice’ or ‘reckless disregard’ for the truth, and do so with ‘clear and convincing’ evidence,” as Bill Grueskin observed in the Columbia Journalism Review back then. “Roughly, this would mean they knew that what they wrote about Palin was false and published it anyway, or were astoundingly reckless in not caring whether it was true or false.”

The U.S. Supreme Court long ago established this standard in a ruling on the First Amendment intended to protect the press from the chilling threat of constant and costly-to-defend lawsuits from any politician or public figure with a gripe about news coverage.

A jury hearing Palin’s case the first time was deliberating when the judge dismissed the lawsuit and was later reported to have reached the same conclusion as the judge. But Rakoff’s action allowed Palin to appeal the case, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Rakoff “improperly intruded on the jury’s role by making credibility determinations and weighing evidence.”

It also cited “several trial errors, including the exclusion of relevant evidence, an inaccurate jury instruction, and jurors learning of the district court’s” decision while deliberating.

The big question surrounding the case as it heads into a retrial is whether Palin’s attorneys will frame the issue the same as in the first case.

Cultural influences

Journalism is a mistake-filled business. Journalists daily deal with tons of information. And these days, many – far too many – are writing on subjects about which they have no fundamental knowledge and with little time to do any research.

And, of course, humans are inherently fallible.

There is, however, an interesting question to be asked about the politically aligned, good-guy/bad-guy environments in which many journalists now work.

Do such environments make it easier for a reporter or editor to make the sort of mistake made in the Palin case, and if so, should a business promoting this sort of environment  – in this case the Times – be held responsible for the result?

There is no doubt that Plalin, a liberal Alaska governor turned national conservative firebrand, was long on the bad- guys list at an NYT marching ever more fervently toward the left. The latter shift grew so great that Bari Weiss, an opinion editor and writer on culture and politics at the Times, quit in 2020 and wrote this in her letter of resignation:

“…A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.”

Much of this culture shift was well underway well before the arrival of Weiss, who was hired in 2017. That just happened to be the same year that the Times wrote the editorial accusing Palin of inspiring a 2011 Tucson massacre by a gunman who, as it turned out, appeared to be one of the few people in the country who didn’t know who Palin at the height of her polebrity.

By then, Palin had also found a friend in the form of newly elected President Donald Trump, who held a special place on the Times’ enemies list. The Times did its best to stop Trump’s first successful bid for the presidency and found itself out of step with the nation afterward.

As Weiss wrote in that resignation letter, “the lessons that ought to have followed (Trump’s) election – lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society – have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

She was not among the “enlightened few,” and that, she claimed, led to her life being made miserable in the Times’ newsroom.

“My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views,” she wrote. “They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again.’ Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly ‘inclusive’ one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action.”

All in all, she pretty accurately painted a picture of an environment in which it would be easy for a Times editorial writer to fall victim to a lingering memory of Palin instigating the Tucson shootings without bothering to check to see if that was indeed what happened.

And the human memory regularly and so easily distorts history. Ask anyone about past weather extremes, and you’re sure to hear about how it was “always” colder, “always” rainer or snowier, “always” drier, “always” windier, etc., etc.

This is why journalists are taught to check facts previously documented, something pretty easy to do in the Internet Age. You can just type a question into a search engine such as Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo.

The sad history

In the tubes now, you can quickly find out more than you ever wanted to know about the 2011 shooting spree of 22-year-old mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner, who opened fire at a political rally at a Tucson supermarket killing six and injuring 13.

This happened not long after the website of Palin’s political action committee posted a map of contested Congressional election districts. The SarahPac post used gunsight-like crosshairs to designate members of the House of Representatives that Palin thought deserved to be removed from office.

After the shooting, there was a lot of speculation about the possibility that the SarahPac post might have inspired Loughner to open fire to ensure Gifford, one of the targeted representatives, would never return to the nation’s capital.

“Did Sarah Palin’s Target Map Play Role in Giffords Shooting,” The Atlantic magazine bluntly headlined in the days after the shooting. “Was it yelling fire in a crowded theater”?

“The map, released amid a wave of small-scale violence against Democratic lawmakers, marked each targeted district with a set of crosshairs,” Max Fisher wrote in the story beneath the headline. “Palin, who had promoted the map by tweeting ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD,’ drew controversy with the map, which some critics saw as a winking approval of violence.”

As it turned out, the SarahPac post appeared to have never been seen by Loughner, who was, in the wake of the shootings, diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Booted out of Pima Community College in the fall of 2010 because of his behavioral problems, he had become increasingly unstable in the months leading up to the shootings.

“We told him that he needed to see someone,” USA Today quoted his mother, Amy Loughner, having told investigators. “His behavior is not normal….We’d hear him having conversations with himself. Or, or, or just, we, a while ago, he was like, he, he was making all kinds of noises.”

The Today story ran in March 2013, five months after Loughner pleaded guilty to taking a semi-automatic handgun and three magazines of ammunition to the supermarket where Gifford was holding a rally.

He admitted to 19 charges of murder and attempted murder after prosecutors agreed to waive the death penalty for the killings.

“Given the defendant’s history of significant mental illness, this plea agreement, which requires the defendant to spend the remainder of his natural life in prison, with no possibility of parole, is a just and appropriate resolution of this case,” U.S. Attorney John S. Leonardo said in a prepared statement at the time.

How Times editor James Bennet missed all of this history is unclear, but five years later in an editorial focused on yet another attempted assassination of a Congressman, Bennet wrote that Loughner’s link to Palin’s “political incitement was clear” in 2011.

At the first trial, he took responsibility for the mistake, admitted he made it and argued that it was remedied by a correction made the next day.

“He took the blame while explaining an email he sent to editorial writer Elizabeth Williamson …(on) the night the editorial was published online with a headline of ‘America’s Lethal Politics,'” the New York Post reported at that time.

In that email, Bennet informed Williamson that he had significantly rewritten her draft editorial and asked her to “please take a look,” but he, at trial, made a point of saying he was not trying to blame Williamson for the false claim that later appeared in the newspaper.

But, obviously, if Williamson took a look as requested, she didn’t take a very good one.

Was this a mistake on her part, as it was on Bennet’s, or was it the result of Times fostering a culture that, Weiss claimed, had become “more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy,” a culture that wouldn’t care if someone like Palin got blamed for something she didn’t do?

A culture that might well argue it was OK she got blamed because, c’mon, she could have been responsible.

It is hard to argue that this Times culture of the present, not to mention its various agendas, doesn’t influence what the newspaper reports because,” to again quote Weiss, “they believe the ultimate goal is righteous.”

There is a lot of righteousness in the Times these days. Righteousness best explains how the Times reported that Alaska has been witnessing dwindling catches of salmon ‘in an era of climate change and pollution” when in fact the state has been experiencing returns of salmon in numbers never imagined thanks to climate change.

Granted, a sizeable part of the bounty is tied to the smallish pink salmon favored by Alaska’s free-range ocean farming operations, but there is scientific agreement that warming has fueled an explosion in high-value Bristol Bay sockeye salmon. 

Ignorance and incompetence are easy explanations and often good ones for journalistic mistakes, but doesn’t a business bear some responsibility for consciously fostering a culture that encourages double standards for how people and issues are treated – double standards that reflect the newspaper’s good-bad, black-and-white view of a very grey world?

It might be worth noting that the very same Times that called out bad-guy Palin for something she didn’t do chose to stand firmly behind good-guy President Joe Biden as the mentally failing chief executive marched toward re-election last year.

In April 2024, the Times was happily reporting that “President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president” even though many, if not most Americans, could already see  Biden wasn’t fit to finish out in existing term, let alone start another.

Somehow, however, the Times was able to overlook what had become of Biden until after the Biden-Trump debate of June 2024 that ended, as a liberal NPR put it, with “many Democrats…ringing the fire alarms.”

Why were the doing that? Because by then by then it was impossible Biden’s failing mental capacities, and yet the Times had managed to do so for months. This sort of thing really doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s not a mistake. It’s a reflection of a culture that has let its politics trump its objectivity. And in that world the Palin mistake becomes something less than a true mistake. It becomes a mistake that was destined to happen, which raises interesting questions as to who should be held responsible.