Former New York Times Editor James Bennet Says Sarah Palin Error Was 'My Fault'
Former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet took responsibility in court on Tuesday for an editorial that stands at the center of a defamation lawsuit brought by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R).
“This is my fault, right? I wrote those sentences and I’m not looking to shift the blame to anyone else,” Bennet said in a Manhattan federal courtroom, adding that he just wanted to say so “for the record.”
Bennet ran the esteemed paper’s opinion pages from 2016 until his ouster in 2020 over a controversy involving a different editorial.
The piece concerning Palin, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” was published the same day a gunman terrorized members of Congress practicing for their annual bipartisan baseball game in June 2017, seriously wounding Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). It argued that American political rhetoric had become far too vicious, and American gun policies far too lax.
But it contained a significant error in its mention of Palin, and was corrected around 12 hours after it went up on the Times’ website. (It was too late to immediately correct the print edition, so a correction there ran the following day.)
While Bennet had not written the first draft of the editorial ― another Times opinion writer, Elizabeth Williamson, had pitched the idea and pulled it together ― he made substantial changes that included adding misleading statements about Palin.
“America’s Lethal Politics” drew a direct link between an image Palin’s political action committee once published and the last time someone opened fire on a member of Congress: when Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot in 2011 with several others, including a 9-year-old. The image, published months before the Giffords shooting, had depicted a map of the United States with crosshairs targeting certain congressional districts that were held by Democrats.
Because the 2017 shooting suspect, James Hodgkinson, appeared to be a Bernie Sanders supporter, the Times editorial attempted to argue that both Democrats and Republicans were inspiring violence. Yet the Palin map was never directly linked to the Giffords shooting. Commentators at the time made the connection, but no evidence ever emerged to suggest Giffords’ shooter, Jared Loughner, had seen the map or been inspired by Palin’s words.
Bennet also acknowledged in court on Tuesday that he did not know of any evidence linking Democratic rhetoric to Hodgkinson’s attack, either.
He suggested that meant the editorial’s logic “fell apart,” but quickly pulled an about-face.
“I wouldn’t say the argument would fall apart. I withdraw that,” Bennet testified. “The overall argument of the piece would still have been valid.”
Bennet said he hadn’t done the research for “America’s Lethal Politics” himself; rather, he assigned that work to other Times staffers. By the time he had the first draft of the editorial from Williamson, he was staring down the paper’s strict print deadline.
“I was concerned about getting the piece done in time,” Bennet testified. “I began just editing the piece myself.”
He later sent Williamson a revised draft, asking her to look it over, and testified that meant she should have fact-checked it. But he clarified that he was not trying to “shift the blame.”
An email from Ross Douthat, a Times opinion colleague, alerted Bennet there might be something wrong with the editorial late that same night, and he told Douthat he would address it in the morning. Tweets about the piece from “media people,” Bennet said, were also critical.
But Bennet testified that he did not attempt to fact-check the piece himself that night or the following morning.
Palin’s team has suggested that Bennet, who held prestigious jobs in news media for decades, should have known better.
Her attorneys argue that she’s entitled to damages from the newspaper, which has not gone to trial for a libel suit since the 1960s. That suit, Times v. Sullivan, led to a Supreme Court decision that still holds sway over how defamation suits are handled in the United States today, introducing the “actual malice” standard. The principle that the plaintiff must prove the defendant knew the claim in question was false makes it very hard to successfully sue a media outlet for defamation against a public figure in the U.S.
If appealed, Palin’s case could give the Supreme Court a chance to lower the bar for suing the press.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
