Sarah Palin’s loss of her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times has reaffirmed, for now, more than a half-century of legal precedent that protects journalists when they make inadvertent — even sloppy — mistakes.
But her case still may have achieved another aim that she and her lawyers said they had all along: to shine an unflattering light on the process of producing daily journalism, and to nudge the courts to reconsider why the law sets an extremely high bar to prove defamation cases against media outlets.
“I’m not happy at the beating The Times — and the press in general — had to take in this process,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor at the University of Utah College of Law, adding that it was “reassuring that both the judge and the jury independently saw that our strict constitutional protections don’t permit easy punishment of the press.”
Still, Ms. Andersen Jones added, “I can’t help but worry that the core principles took a hit here.”
While The Times succeeded in convincing a jury and a federal judge that Ms. Palin failed to prove that Times journalists acted with “actual malice” — meaning displaying a reckless disregard for the truth or publishing information known to be false, the standard the Supreme Court set in 1964 for public figures who sue for defamation — her case is not likely to be the last word on the matter.
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