New York (AFP) – A US jury found Tuesday that The New York Times did not libel former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a 2017 editorial she claimed damaged her reputation, the paper said. In its editorial, the Times linked a 2011 shooting in Arizona that killed six people and wounded lawmaker Gabby Giffords with an advertisement run by Palin’s political action committee. The ad, which ran shortly before the attack, showed Gifford’s congressional district in the crosshairs of a firearm.
The Times corrected the 2017 editorial the next day, saying there was nothing that could demonstrate that the perpetrator had been driven to act by the controversial ad. In 2022, a New York jury ruled in the newspaper’s favor a day after the presiding judge said he would dismiss the lawsuit irrespective of their verdict that became an important test case for freedom of speech.
Last August, the US Court of Appeals overturned the decision that threw out the case and ordered a new trial. The jury deliberated for two hours before rejecting Palin’s defamation claim, the Times reported. “We want to thank the jurors for their careful deliberations. The decision reaffirms an important tenet of American law: publishers are not liable for honest mistakes,” a New York Times spokeswoman said in a statement.
The bar to prove defamation in the United States is high, due to a landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling that shields journalists from liability if they make unintentional errors. Palin, a former governor of Alaska, was the running mate of Republican presidential candidate John McCain during his 2008 election defeat to Barack Obama.
“We didn’t prevail in federal court against The New York Times. But please keep fighting for integrity in media. I’ll keep asking the press to quit making things up,” Palin wrote on X after the jury verdict in a Manhattan federal court.
© 2024 AFP
