Judge Plans to Dismiss Sarah Palin’s Lawsuit Against The Times

Ms. Palin’s suit alleged that The Times defamed her with an editorial that incorrectly asserted a link between her political rhetoric and a mass shooting near Tucson, Ariz., in 2011 that left six people dead and 14 wounded, including Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress. Ms. Giffords’s district had been one of 20 singled out on a map circulated by Ms. Palin’s political action committee underneath digitized cross hairs. There was no evidence the shooter had seen or been motivated by the map.

The editorial, which The Times corrected the morning after it was published after readers pointed out the mistake, was published on June 14, 2017. That day, a gunman had opened fire at a baseball field in Virginia where Republican congressmen were practicing, injuring several people including Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana. The headline was “America’s Lethal Politics,” and the editorial asked whether the Virginia shooting was evidence of how vicious American politics had become.

On the witness stand, the former Times editor who inserted the erroneous wording into the piece, James Bennet, testified that the incident had left him racked with guilt and that he had thought about it almost every day since. “It was just a terrible mistake,” he said.

Ms. Palin and her lawyers attempted to convince the jury that Mr. Bennet had acted out of animus toward her and, regardless of any contrition he later showed, was reckless in rushing to judgment about her.

The Times has not lost a libel case in an American courtroom in at least 50 years.

Legal challenges to press protections have become more common, and Ms. Palin’s case has been just one of several high-profile lawsuits against journalists to move through the courts in recent years. First Amendment scholars tracking such cases have said that the rise has — not incidentally — coincided with the growing mistrust of mainstream media on the political right and a climate of hostility fostered by former President Donald J. Trump.

In 2019, a Kentucky high school student, Nicholas Sandmann, claimed he was defamed by press reports from The Washington Post, CNN and others depicting his encounter with a Native American man on the National Mall. Those cases were settled. And Devin Nunes, a former Republican member of Congress, is pursuing a case against a reporter now working for Politico who posted to Twitter an article that Mr. Nunes said harmed his family.