James Bennet, the former New York Times Opinion editor, told a jury on Thursday that he was the person responsible for rewriting crucial parts of an editorial that Sarah Palin said defamed her.
Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska and one-time Republican vice-presidential nominee, sued The Times in 2017 over the editorial, which erroneously linked her political action committee to a mass shooting. The editorial was fixed and a correction was issued the day after publication.
“I blew it, you know,” Mr. Bennet said on the stand, choking up with emotion. “I made a mistake.”
The case is being tried for a second time in a federal court in Manhattan after an appeals court ruled last year that the judge had made several errors that had tainted the previous trial in 2022. In that trial, both the judge and a jury ruled against Ms. Palin.
While the facts in the case remain the same, the new trial comes amid a vastly different media landscape. President Trump has returned to office and ramped up his attacks against the press; trust in the news media has continued to decline and several high-profile defamation cases have resulted in significant payouts.
At issue is the original version of an editorial that described an atmosphere of heated political rhetoric in the wake of a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Virginia. The editorial wrongly linked a map distributed by Ms. Palin’s political action committee, which displayed cross hairs over Democratic congressional electoral districts, to a deadly 2011 shooting that also gravely injured Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress.
There is no evidence the gunman ever saw the map. The Times corrected the editorial soon after it was published and issued an apology on social media.
Lawyers for Ms. Palin are seeking to paint Mr. Bennet, who left The Times in 2020, as having intentionally inserted a passage into the editorial to lay blame directly on Ms. Palin. The Times and Mr. Bennet have countered that it was an honest mistake made on deadline that was quickly fixed and acknowledged.
On Wednesday, lawyers questioned Mr. Bennet about his brother, Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado. He said that he may have been aware that there were threats at his brother’s office in the days following the 2011 shooting of Ms. Giffords. But Mr. Bennet, who at that time was the editor of The Atlantic, said he did not know if The Atlantic had written about the threats and that he had recused himself of any coverage involving his brother.
Mr. Bennet took the stand again on Thursday, with Ms. Palin sitting nearby in the courtroom. he acknowledged having rewritten parts of the editorial and inserting the words “the link to political incitement was clear” in reference to the map from Ms. Palin’s political action committee and the shooting. But he disagreed with the suggestion that he had meant to imply a direct causal link.
“I did not think we were saying the map caused him to act,” Mr. Bennet told the jury, explaining that he meant the rhetoric “could have a role.”
He also said that he had not fact-checked what he had written because he did not think he had added any new facts into the editorial and thought it would be checked over by editors.
Mr. Bennet became emotional over the issue of an apology to Ms. Palin. Her lawyer, Shane Vogt, had said in his opening statement that The Times had never apologized to Ms. Palin and did not name her in the correction on the editorial.
“I did and I do apologize to Governor Palin” Mr. Bennet said. “It was a mistake.”
Mr. Bennet also said that the reference to Ms. Palin’s political action committee in the editorial was not meant to imply anything about Ms. Palin herself.
“There wasn’t any part of me that thought that Sarah Palin herself had drawn the cross hairs on the map or something like that,” he said.
The trial will continue next week, when Ms. Palin is expected to testify.
Katie Robertson covers the media industry for The Times. Email: [email protected]
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