eMails revealed during Sarah Palin’s defamation trial against the New York Times Friday showed the paper’s editors ignored fact checkers before publishing an editorial that linked the former Alaskan Governor to a mass shooting.
The NY Post reports the emails were entered as evidence on the second day of the libel trial against the paper after a June 2017 editorial linked Palin’s political action committee to a mass shooting in Arizona that wounded former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six people in 2011.
Jesse Wegman, a member of the paper’s editorial board, wrote in an email that it appeared the Times tried to “sneak” in the link between Palin’s PAC and the shooting in the editorial.
The editorial, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” suggested a map distributed by Palin’s PAC that featured stylized crosshairs over congressional districts, including Gifford’s, contributed to the shooting. The editorial was corrected hours after it was published.
The evening the opinion piece was published, James Bennet – the former editor of the editorial pages – emailed editorial section journalist Elizabeth Williamson, who wrote the first draft of the piece, saying that he “really reworked this one,” documents revealed in court Friday showed, the Daily Mail reported.
Later that night, Williamson received an email from a Times fact checker, who indicated that the paper had previously written about Palin’s PAC’s map in 2010, “months before” the mass shooting in Tucson. The fact checker’s note was apparently ignored.
Just before 11 p.m. after the editorial had been published Wegman emailed Williamson again, writing “The gun rights brigade is having a seizure over the Giffords – Loughner – Palin link.”
The exchanges changed tone the following morning when the editors realized they may have made a mistake. In an email to Wegman, Williamson said that Bennett “would like to check what the truth is here.”
Bennet asked Williamson just after 5 a.m. to start drafting a correction, Politico reported.
Bennett texted Williamson he felt “lousy’”and that he had “just moved too fast” in publishing the piece. According to court documents, Bennet added the lines about political incitement over which Palin later sued.
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