On Thursday, POLITICO founder John Harris wrote a scathing editorial blasting former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for her defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, calling the whole thing a "cynical spectacle" — but also took shots at the Times itself for how they treated the writer at the center of the controversy.
The lawsuit stems from a 2017 article by James Bennett that initially accused Palin of inspiring the 2011 Tucson shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords — something the paper swiftly clarified was unsubstantiated, but Palin nonetheless pushed back against with litigation. Palin has suggested she may try to use the case to overturn longstanding First Amendment protections for journalists.
"Palin’s motives are not genuinely about seeking redress for a factual error that was quickly corrected," wrote Harris. "She knows the whole episode has enhanced, not damaged, her reputation with the partisans on whom her political and financial fortunes depend. Her target is less Bennet than the news organization her confederates on the right have seethed over since the Nixon era. Others cheering her case hope to weaken the legal protections benefiting all journalists."
But the Times itself isn't innocent in this, argued Harris.
"Bennet is being defended by a news organization that made a panicky decision to force his resignation rather than defend him against an attack from the left, led by many of its own staff members," wrote Harris. "The trial’s discovery process made clear that Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger had pressed Bennet to make his page a bolder, faster, more surprising place. Take more risks, he urged Bennet in a job review. Then he tremblingly raced for the exits when some of those risks had uncomfortable results."
Ultimately, argued Harris, Bennet is the only person not operating in bad faith in this whole saga.
"Three years ago, in a lengthy conversation published in POLITICO magazine, Bennet told me his philosophy as editorial page editor: 'We give people an honest struggle, an open debate from a lot of different points of view and show that you can do that kind of work respectfully, that you can actually engage across these different ideological divides and your — even now, these days — tribal divides,'" concluded Harris. "That aspiration feels a good bit more distant now than three years ago."
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