Sarah Palin Really Won
In the Court of Public Opinion
Yes, we know the judge’s verdict in Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit and that the jury also found in favor of the New York Times.
Sarah Palin’s Libel Claim Against The Times Is Rejected by a Jury
The verdict came a day after the judge said he planned to dismiss the case, ruling that Ms. Palin’s legal team had failed to prove that the newspaper defamed her.
Feb. 15, 2022
A jury rejected Sarah Palin’s libel suit against The New York Times on Tuesday, a day after the judge said he would dismiss the case if the jury ruled in her favor because her legal team had failed to provide sufficient evidence that she had been defamed by a 2017 editorial erroneously linking her to a mass shooting.
Even still, every day of the trial, news consumers learned how then editorial page editor James Bennet made a stupid mistake — a gratuitous stupid mistake. And they read about it in The New York Times. Over and over again.
Readers also could find the dirty details among the Gray Lady’s scrappy competitors. The New York Post reported:
The editorial was published the same day a gunman opened fire on GOP members of Congress, wounding Rep. Steve Scalise, at a Northern Virginia baseball diamond.
The piece sought to make a point that there was a pattern of violence against members of Congress — on both sides of the political spectrum — due to a culture of heated political rhetoric, Bennet said.
To make the point in the editorial, Bennet asserted that prior to the Virginia shooting, the gunman who opened fire on Rep. Giffords and others in 2011 was politically incited, in part because of a map Palin’s PAC had circulated.
The map showed congressional districts, including Giffords’, with stylized cross hairs that resembled a rifle’s sights over them.
“The link to the political incitement was clear,” the editorial said of the 2011 shooting.
Problem: Bennet was wrong. It was a misinformation driven by bias. That Bennet quickly corrected the mistake is fitting — that he overreached to make it, that’s the issue behind the suit.
One word: Karma. I see deserved comeuppance for a profession that mistreated Palin from the day the late Sen. John McCain named the Alaska governor to be his running mate in 2008.
I covered both national political conventions in 2008 and observed first-hand the feeding frenzy among my colleagues to find dirt on the GOP newbie. The judgments about Palin’s working class background, her non-Ivy academic credentials, her style of dress and speaking — they were unending.
As I wrote at the time,
Sarah Palin is different. Too different. Few Beltway insiders thought Republican nominee John McCain would pick her as his running mate. She is not a Washington staple, like the Democratic veep pick, Joe Biden, whose mistakes are established facts that are as worn as a pair of old shoes.
She is a runner - which is standard among modern politicians. She is a hunter - which is not.
She did not move up through the usual cursus honorum of the standard running mate added to a ticket to establish gravitas. McCain didn't need to weight his ticket. So he chose an upstart. He took a risk.
To the Washington press corps, that means she was "not vetted." This gives the press corps a grand excuse to tear Palin and her family into little, tiny pieces.
The folks in the press seats have never shown that kind of zeal to learn all there was to know about Joe Biden, Barack Obama’s chosen running mate, who pretty much got a pass. He wasn’t Sarah Palin, that’s all my colleagues needed to know.
And now he’s president.
Debra J. Saunders is a fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. Email her at dsaunders@discovery.org. Click below for notices of future posts.