Sarah Palin Tried to Sue The New York Times for Defamation. She Just Lost.

Judge Tosses Lawsuit, Says ‘Mistakes Will Be Made, Some of Which Will Be Hurtful to Others’

A federal judge has just tossed Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, declaring that a “robust” free press will at times make mistakes. The Manhattan federal judge wrote that the Times had not been malicious when it mentioned Palin’s infamous Super PAC image of a map with crosshairs over then-Congresswoman Gabby Gifford’s district in a recent June 14 editorial about violence and political rhetoric. The Times corrected the editorial over the next two days and also apologized, but Palin saw an opportunity and took it.

“Nowhere is political journalism so free, so robust, or perhaps so rowdy as in the United States,” U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff wrote in his opinion Tuesday, as Courthouse News Service reports. “In the exercise of that freedom, mistakes will be made, some of which will be hurtful to others.” 

Judge Rakoff noted The Times had not acted maliciously in the editorial, titled, “America’s Lethal Politics,” written in the hours after Representative Steve Scalise had been shot on a baseball field in June.

“Responsible journals will promptly correct their errors; others will not,” Judge Rakoff continued. “But if political journalism is to achieve its constitutionally endorsed role of challenging the powerful, legal redress by a public figure must be limited to those cases where the public figure has a plausible factual basis for complaining that the mistake was made maliciously, that is, with knowledge it was false or with reckless disregard of its falsity.”

Palin has not yet commented.

The New York Post in late June reported Palin’s lawsuit in part claimed: “Mrs. Palin brings this action to hold The Times accountable for falsely stating to millions of people that she, a devoted wife, mother and grandmother, who committed a substantial portion of her adult life to public service, is part of a pattern of ​’​lethal​’​ politics and responsible for inciting an attack that seriously injured numerous people and killed six, including a nine-year-old girl who, at that time, was the same age as Mrs. Palin’s youngest daughter.”

The amount Palin was asking for had not been determined.

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license