Sarah Palin’s Defamation Suit Against Is Dismissed<br />Earlier this month, Judge Rakoff had ordered the author of the editorial to testify in an unusual evidentiary hearing, saying<br />that a central question he would consider when weighing The Times’s motion was whether Ms. Palin’s defamation complaint contained “sufficient allegations of actual malice.”<br />The “actual malice” standard for defamation holds that public officials have to show<br />that news outlets knowingly published false information or had acted with “reckless disregard” for the truth<br />“Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”<br />In the lawsuit, which was filed in June, Ms. Palin contended<br />that a Times editorial that was published roughly two weeks earlier had linked her to a 2011 mass shooting in Arizona even though the news organization knew the connection was false.<br />A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin<br />against , saying Ms. Palin’s complaint failed to show that a mistake in an editorial was made maliciously.<br />“What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin<br />that are very rapidly corrected,” Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan said in his ruling.<br />The editorial suggested a connection between a map of targeted electoral districts circulated by Ms. Palin’s political action committee and the 2011 mass shooting by Jared L. Loughner<br />that severely wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
