The verdict in the Sarah Palin versus New York Times libel case is in.
And it looks like the New York Times is officially in the clear. The jury unanimously voted in favor of the New York Times not being liable for the editorial that supposedly defamed Sarah Palin.
It was a one-two punch for Palin. The unanimous verdict came a day after the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, ruled that he would set aside the jury’s verdict, whatever it might be, and dismiss the case. He said Palin had failed to make a sufficient argument that the Times had acted with actual malice to let the case be determined by a jury.
The newspaper cheered the verdict, with spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha calling it “a reaffirmation of a fundamental tenet of American law: public figures should not be permitted to use libel suits to punish or intimidate news organizations that make, acknowledge and swiftly correct unintentional errors.”
We’re not going to impugn the jurors. They did what was asked of them.
But it’s very difficult to see that what the New York Times did to Sarah Palin as anything other than a brazen, nakedly partisan hit job.
And she may very well try to appeal. Rakoff wanted the verdict to be heard by the appellate court as well. And now, the jury’s verdict for the Times arrays even steeper odds against Palin’s success.
Palin’s lawsuit took more than 4 1/2 years to unfold. In the trial’s early stages, Rakoff had also concluded that Palin’s team had failed to make a sufficient evidentiary case of actual malice against the Times and its former editorial page editor, James Bennet. He dismissed the case then, too. But the appellate court overruled Rakoff’s decision and ordered him to take a fresh look.
The Times corrected the errors in less than a day, and the newspaper termed them “an honest mistake.” Despite contentions by Palin’s attorneys that the paper had caused harm and had acted out of ideological animus, they did not provide any tangible evidence of such claims.
Many media attorneys saw Palin’s lawsuit as a sharp challenge to the protections afforded to the press by the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision so that journalists could offer tough scrutiny of public figures, even when making mistakes in good faith.
