Sarah Palin v. the New York Times

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, February 06, 2022

 

After the 2008 election and “The Masked Singer” and all the rest of it — finally, here is a contest Sarah Palin deserves to win.

 

The former Alaska governor, vice-presidential candidate, and reality-television clown has sued the New York Times for libel, and she deserves to prevail. The Times editorial page libeled her, straight up, and the court should find in her favor.

 

It does not matter what you think of Palin, or what you think of the New York Times. I have had plenty of occasion to criticize both of them over the years and a few opportunities to praise each of them, too. Palin vs. the New York Times is perfect culture-war fodder, but this isn’t a culture-war question. This is first a legal question, one in which Palin has the better case, and then a broader question of how our news media go about their business — and here the New York Times has offered a master class in what not to do.

 

At issue is a Times editorial in which the paper blamed the Palin campaign’s political rhetoric for the shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. “The link to political incitement was clear,” the Times claimed. This claim was false — a fact conceded even by the Times itself. In truth, there was no link between the Palin campaign’s advertising and the Giffords shooting, much less a clear one. Even if we were to concede that Palin’s advertisements constituted incitement — which they most certainly did not, being utterly ordinary political material — nobody has shown any link between that material and the shooting.

 

And there is a good reason for that: There isn’t one.

 

The Times later corrected the editorial and does not dispute that it was wrong on the facts.

 

For a claim to be libelous, it must check three boxes, once it has been established that the claim was published and the subject identified: 1) the claim has to be false, which this one was; 2) it has to be defamatory, which there is no real question this one was: Not only is the claim defamatory on its face, it was obviously meant to be defamatory, in that the entire point of linking Palin to the shooting was to demean and discredit her; and 3) when the claim involves a public figure such as Palin, it has to have been published with “actual malice” or “reckless disregard for the truth.” There is a pretty good case to be made for actual malice: Palin had nothing at all to do with the story, and the only point of dragging her name into it was to damage her reputation and her political prospects. But even if you think “actual malice” is a coin toss, can anybody seriously argue that the Times’s performance in this matter was anything other than reckless in its disregard for the truth?

 

The Times should not bother writing another defense of its actions and should instead write an apology and a check.

 

Because the Times has no one to blame but itself. Palin’s lawyers will argue that the Times has a bitter and pronounced bias against Republican officeholders — and they will be correct. Palin’s lawyers will argue that the Times practices a double-standard where figures such as Palin are concerned — and they will be correct. Palin’s lawyers will argue that the Times already considered her a contemptible figure unworthy of being treated according to the usual standards of journalism, including a healthy scrutiny about claims amounting to guilt by association when there is no association at all to begin with — and they will be correct about that, too. Palin’s team will say that the claim was false and defamatory, and the Times’s lawyers must agree.

 

The Times’s reckless attack on Palin was not a matter of opinion, even though it appeared in the opinion pages. The Times asserted a supposed fact falsely, defaming her with utter disregard for the truth.

 

Much has been made of the fact that the Times has not lost a libel case in the United States in 50 years, as though this is a factory floor with one of those “x days since an accident” signs that’s going to have to be flipped back to zero for the first time in a generation. I don’t know that I’d think of that as a winning streak, exactly, but, in any case, it is irrelevant: The Times libeled Palin, so the Times deserves to lose her libel suit. It is a shame that the Times already has pushed out editorial-page editor James Bennet over some unrelated BS, thus depriving itself of the opportunity to fire him for this, which would have been an appropriate thing to do. But our press pushes people out for being unpopular, not for being incompetent.

 

Our friends in the media who bemoan the rise of Donald Trump and Trump-style politics — which is to say, the politics of lies — have some penance of their own to do, because it was not right-wing populists who trained so many Americans to be skeptical of what they read in the newspaper: It was the newspapers themselves, not least the New York Times. As I have written before, the Times does some great work on its news pages, particularly on its local-news pages, but the intellectual standards of its opinion pages can be shockingly low — especially when it comes to the matter of entirely unsubstantiated claims about Republican politicians. And I say that as someone who has written for the Times opinion page.

 

This isn’t just a problem for the Times opinion pages, it isn’t just a problem for the Times as a whole, and it isn’t just a problem for the press, either: The more elite institutions fail to do their basic jobs, and the more they abuse their positions at the commanding heights, the more room they create for populist demagoguery — ironically, the very kind of politics in which Sarah Palin today specializes, to the modest extent that she remains a political figure.

 

As every recovering addict knows, the first step toward getting better is admitting that you have a problem. And the New York Times has a problem. The Times may not have any love for Sarah Palin, nor she for it, but the former governor is doing the newspaper a favor by giving it the opportunity to recommit itself to fundamental journalistic values, one of which is not making stuff up about people you hate simply because it is fun and profitable to hurt them.