Sarah Palin Sues The Old Gray Lady

For John, BLUF:  I am pulling for Governor Sarah Palin.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Tucson Shooting:  ‘The Right Is Coming After Us’

From Hot Air, by Mr John Sexton, 10 September 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

Last month a judge ruled that Sarah Palin’s defamation lawsuit against the NY Times could go to trial.  Because she is a public figure, Palin still has a tough road ahead of her.  She has to prove that the Times wasn’t just sloppy but is guilty of actual malice or, at a minimum, “reckless disregard” for the truth.  That won’t be easy but the judge in the case did agree it’s not impossible because the Times’ work, in particular that of now-former editor James Bennet on this piece was spectacularly awful.

Today Columbia Journalism Review published the most detailed breakdown I’ve seen of how that terrible editorial got published in the first place.  I’m going to skip over most of the preliminaries here and assume you’re already familiar with the backstory involving Sarah Palin’s Facebook map and the 2011 Tucson shooting by a deranged man named Jared Lee Loughner.  All you really need to know is that, despite a lot of media outrage directed at Palin at the time, there has never been even a shred of evidence that Loughner had ever seen her Facebook map or that he cared one way or the other about Palin.  His politics, so far as they are coherent at all, appear to have leaned to the left.

All of this seemed to be a long settled-issue until the Times needed to put out an editorial about the shooting of some Republicans by a deranged Bernie Sanders fan in 2017.

The idea for an editorial on the Arlington shooting came from [Elizabeth] Williamson, a Washington-based edit-page writer who had previously reported in the US and abroad for The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.  A few hours after the bullets flew, according to her deposition, she sent an email to colleagues with the subject line, “Are we writing on the congressional shooting?” An editor responded, “Can’t see it yet, but keep looking.  A nutcase who hates Republicans???”

Already it’s clear that this is shaping up to be an editorial about political violence and it looks like someone on the left is responsible.

For the next few hours, Williamson and other edit-page staff researched motives for the shooting. Mid-afternoon, [James] Bennet contributed to an email string:  “Did we ever write anything connecting … the Giffords shooting to some kind of incitement?” A colleague offered up a 2011 column in which Frank Rich mentioned Palin’s map but noted that “we have no idea” if Loughner had seen it before the shooting, adding, “nor does it matter.”

Hours before the editorial was published, Bennet is already casting about for a way to compare the shooting at the baseball diamond to the one in Tucson years earlier. Critically, he’s not sure if there’s a connection. A little before 5 pm Williamson submits a draft of the editorial. Here’s what it said about Palin and the map:

Just as in 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a nine-year-old girl, Mr. Hodgkinson’s rage was nurtured in a vile political climate. Then, it was the pro-gun right being criticized: in the weeks before the shooting Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs.

I nhope Ms Sarah Palin wins and wins the appeal, all the way to the Supreme Court.

We need to stop this partisan character assassination by the press.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff