New York Times offers defense in Sarah Palin libel trial: A ‘terrible’ mistake, not malice

NEW YORK — James Bennet said he had “a million other things going on” when a fellow editor stopped by his office at The New York Times to tell him about weaknesses in a draft of an editorial they were rushing to publish on a June evening in 2017.

Then the chief of the paper’s editorial page, Bennet read the piece and agreed it wasn’t quite working. But while he generally preferred to let his writers revise their work, Bennet told a jury Wednesday he was concerned about the paper’s looming deadline for the night — and so took it upon himself to rewrite it.

In the course of rapidly reworking the piece, Bennet inserted an inaccurate sentence — notable for his use of the word “incitement” — that led to the Times getting sued for defamation by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. But on Day 5 of the blockbuster trial in Manhattan’s U.S. District Court, Bennet spent hours on the stand describing his on-the-job failures that the newspaper’s lawyers tried to present as stemming from honest mistakes — and not the “actual malice” Palin must prove to show she has been libeled.

“I have regretted this pretty much every day since,” Bennet said, describing his remorse over the word choices.

Palin herself made a brief appearance on the stand, perhaps the only day of the trial when the two most high-profile witnesses would both testify — and her hand-holding arrival and departure with retired NHL forward Ron Duguay mesmerized a flock of photographers at the courthouse. But her testimony Wednesday started in the final moments of the day’s proceedings and remained limited to details about her personal and professional biography.

She is to return to court Thursday for a chance to get into the heart of the case — her claim that the newspaper damaged her reputation with an editorial linking her campaign rhetoric to a mass shooting. Closing arguments are set for Friday.

Palin, 57, described herself for jurors as a single mother and grandmother who “holds down the fort” for her family in Alaska when not advising candidates about “the good, bad and ugly” of politics. She also recalled the surprise over her emergence as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008, saying, “I don’t think they were prepared for me.”

Arguments in the first libel suit against the Times in the U.S. to make it to trial in nearly 20 years are expected to conclude this week. It’s a case that could upend legal precedents that for decades have offered broad protections to media organizations when writing about public figures.

The crux of the testimony Wednesday came from Bennet, who left the Times in 2020, and provided a window into the inner workings of its prestigious opinion section.

[Curious Alaska: What’s Sarah Palin up to these days?]

The editorial in question, written in the hours after a shooting attack on a group of congressional Republicans at a baseball practice in Virginia, lamented the state of political discourse and the effect of vitriolic rhetoric on a country awash in guns. The early draft, by another Times writer, drew a comparison with a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson that injured then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., and killed six people — and noted that before that tragedy, Palin’s political action committee had circulated a stylized U.S. map that placed crosshairs on Giffords’ district and several other Democratic-held seats.

In the course of editing the story, Bennet added a sentence about the Tucson shooting: “The link to political incitement was clear,” he wrote.

It was only after the editorial was published that night on the Times’s website that Bennet got an email from Ross Douthat, a conservative opinion columnist for the Times, expressing his “utter bafflement” that the essay claimed such a link.

Douthat also testified Wednesday, saying that he became aware that night of widespread criticism of the editorial online — investigators never established that the mentally ill shooter was motivated by Palin’s map. Douthat, who had closely followed the shooting’s aftermath in 2011, said he realized that “if there was a correction that needed to be made, the sooner the better.”

But Bennet’s late-night email asking Elizabeth Williamson, the original writer, for clarity on the matter arrived after she had gone to sleep.

Bennet testified that the piece had been read by some of the newspaper’s most experienced copy editors in addition to others, and no one had caught the error. “That’s why I was shocked,” he said, and stayed up all night.

“It’s just a terrible thing to make a mistake,” he said. “I have edited, written hundreds of pieces on deadline, probably thousands of pieces overall, and I will say I have made very few mistakes, at least ones that I know of, but I made one that night and it’s terrible.”

The next morning, he asked Williamson and a fact-checker to figure out whether they had the details wrong. The Times later issued two corrections.

“We were being really, really harshly criticized for muddying the record, and I understood now why people like Ross were reading the editorial the way they did,” Bennet said Wednesday. “And I thought it was urgent to correct the piece as forthrightly as possible to acknowledge our mistake. This is basic practice. This is the right thing to do.”

When asked why he didn’t research the question himself while rewriting the editorial, Bennet explained that he was functioning as the “editor, not the reporter, on the piece” — but also that he never thought that the Palin map caused the Tucson shooter to act, and “I don’t think we were saying that, therefore it wouldn’t have entered my mind to research that question.”

Bennet had previously tried to explain that he didn’t see his reference to “political incitement” as meaning a direct cause of violence but rather as a charged environment.

The testimony also revealed that Bennet, in replying to a scramble of media inquiries about the error, had issued an apology of sorts to Palin but that it was never made public.

“I’m not aware that Sarah Palin has asked for an apology,” Bennet relayed to a Times spokesman, in response to a question from CNN, “but, yes, I, James Bennet, do apologize to her for this mistake.”

Bennet testified that he assumed his words of apology were sent to CNN and shared publicly; only days later, he realized that they had been trimmed from the statement due to a Times policy about not apologizing for mistakes — because offering a “we regret the error” message on every correction would render apologies meaningless, he explained.

He said he did not send a personal apology directly to Palin because she was suing the Times. “If I were her under those conditions, I wouldn’t think an apology was being made in good faith, that it would look like an effort to get out of a lawsuit.”

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The Washington Post’s Shayna Jacobs contributed. Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.