Sarah Palin v. The New York Times could be a groundbreaking journalism case

An intriguing defamation case gets underway today: former Alaska governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin v. The New York Times.

To catch you up, Palin sued the Times in 2017 over an editorial that wrongly linked the 2011 shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to a map circulated by Palin’s PAC that showed certain electoral districts under the crosshairs. The Times immediately corrected and apologized for the error. But now the federal courts will hear the case.

At the heart of this matter is the landmark 1964 case of The New York Times v. Sullivan. That decision ruled that not only must public officials prove defamation, but that the news outlet did it with “actual malice.”

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