Defamation isn't always easy to prove in court. If it were, the New York Times and the Washington Post would be launching GoFundMe pages and holding bake sales to pay off their legal bills. Most prominent Republican candidates and politicians probably have at least a dozen legitimate defamation lawsuits against various mainstream media outlets that they'd file right away if they had a decent chance of winning.
With publications like the Times and WaPo, the line between editorial opinion and journalism was obliterated years ago. They're not news organizations, they're one big op-ed. The editorial boards of both use their respective opinion sections to launch attack narratives that will, more often than not, be reinforced by their "journalists."
Prior to the political ascent of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin had been the most maliciously maligned Republican for years. In 2017 — nine years after she'd been on the GOP presidential ticket — Palin had had enough and decided to take the New York Times to court. Palin failed in that effort but is now getting a chance for a new trial.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Palin can try again to prove that the Times should be liable for a 2017 editorial that incorrectly linked her to a mass shooting six years earlier that killed six people and seriously wounded Democratic U.S. congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Lawyers for Palin argued that U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who oversaw the February 2022 trial, wrongly excluded evidence of the Times’ actual malice and wrongly instructed jurors to disregard some of that evidence.
A judge putting his thumb on the scale during a trial to be unfair to a hated Republican? Who ever heard of such a thing?!?!?
This takes us back to a time before Trump's presidency when the American Left insisted that conservative rhetoric was responsible for setting off every unhinged loon in the country. Rush Limbaugh was immediately blamed for almost every mass shooting. In this case, the cretins who masquerade as journalists wanted to blame a digital graphic posted by Palin's political action committee that featured crosshairs that targeted various congressional districts.
The whole thing was about where activists should focus their efforts, but the bottom-feeders who comprise so much of our political journo class simply can't resist an opportunity to be clinically insane.
As with all things having to do with the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media, a double standard is applied. Leftists see no connection whatsoever between their pathological demonization of Donald Trump and the people who want to kill the former president. Oh, they paid a little lip service to taking the tone down a notch after the assassination attempt in July, but that was fleeting. Within 48 hours, Joe Biden was on camera repeating lies about Trump that had long ago been debunked.
Again, defamation suits are an uphill battle. Sarah Palin and her legal team may have a dual purpose here, however.
More from the Post:
Media critics, and Palin herself, have viewed the case as a possible vehicle to overturn New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision that set a high bar for public figures to prove defamation.
It's a safe bet that the Times wasn't running opinion pieces about the desperate need to change the Supreme Court back then.
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