Ex-New York Times editor says Sarah Palin screw-up made editorial board appear ‘partisan’
James Bennet, the former New York Times editorial page editor, said Wednesday that an error he wrote into a 2017 editorial about Sarah Palin stung particularly hard because it made the newspaper’s editorial board appear partisan.
Bennet said he felt “terrible” for the error — and its partisan implication — while responding to questioning by Times lawyer David Axelrod at Palin’s defamation trial against the newspaper in Manhattan federal court.
When he edited the piece on June 14, 2017, Bennet wrote in a paragraph that asserted a gunman who wounded Rep. Gabby Giffords in 2011 was politically incited, in part by a map circulated by Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC.
“It’s just a terrible thing to make a mistake. I’ve edited and written hundreds of pieces on deadline, thousands. I have made very few mistakes, at least ones that I know of,” Bennet said.
“I made one that night. And it’s terrible. And it’s a mistake … that made it look like we were being partisan. It’s extremely important for the editorial board to have a reputation to call balls and strikes without partisanship,” he added.
Responding to a series of questions from Axelrod, Bennet said he had no ill will toward Palin and did not intend to cause her harm by publishing the editorial or by any of the edits he made to it.
He added that he hasn’t apologized to Palin in the years since because the former Alaska governor filed her defamation suit soon after the editorial was published — and he thought offering an apology amid pending litigation would appear disingenuous.
Bennet said he feared Palin, “wouldn’t think an apology was being made in good faith. It would look like an effort to get out of a lawsuit.”
Palin took the stand at the end of the day Wednesday and answered questions from her attorney for about 15 minutes.
She introduced herself to the jury and spoke about her career as a politician, rising from a city council member in Wasilla, Alaska in the early 1990s to a vice presidential candidate about 15 years later.
Palin sued the Times in 2017 after the editorial, headlined “America’s Lethal Politics,” was published the day a gunman opened fire on GOP members of Congress at a Northern Virginia baseball diamond.
The editorial mentioned the 2011 mass shooting that wounded Giffords and falsely asserted there was a “clear” link between the shooting and political incitement.
“Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized crosshairs,” the editorial stated in the next sentence.
No link between the gunman and politics was ever established and the idea the map incited the shooting was debunked years prior to the 2017 editorial.
In his opening statement last week, Palin’s attorney, Shane Vogt, said Bennet and the Times pushed a partisan, pre-determined narrative while ignoring the facts about the 2011 shooting.
“Bennet had his narrative and he stuck to it,” Vogt said.
Attorneys and a spokesperson for the Times have said the error was unintentional and corrected within hours of its publication.
“We published an editorial about an important topic that contained an inaccuracy. We set the record straight with a correction,” a spokesperson for the Times said.
