James Bennet, the former New York Times Opinion editor, took responsibility for an error in an editorial at the center of the case.
James Bennet, the former New York Times Opinion editor, told a jury on Thursday that he was the person responsible for rewriting crucial parts of an editorial that Sarah Palin said defamed her.
Ms. Palin, the former governor of Alaska and onetime Republican vice-presidential nominee, sued The Times in 2017 over the editorial, which erroneously linked her political action committee to a mass shooting. The editorial was fixed and a correction was issued the day after publication.
“I blew it, you know,” Mr. Bennet said on the stand, choking up with emotion. “I made a mistake.”
The case is being tried for a second time in a federal court in Manhattan after an appeals court ruled last year that the judge had made several errors that had tainted the previous trial in 2022. In that trial, both the judge and a jury ruled against Ms. Palin.
While the facts in the case remain the same, the new trial comes amid a vastly different media landscape. President Trump has returned to office and ramped up his attacks against the press, trust in the news media has continued to decline, and several high-profile defamation cases have resulted in significant payouts.
At issue is the original version of an editorial that described an atmosphere of heated political rhetoric in the wake of a shooting at a congressional baseball practice in Virginia. The editorial wrongly linked a map distributed by Ms. Palin’s political action committee, which displayed cross hairs over Democratic congressional electoral districts, to a deadly 2011 shooting that also gravely injured Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress.
There is no evidence the gunman ever saw the map. The Times corrected the editorial soon after it was published and issued an apology on social media.