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Even by the standards of 2025, yesterday was an unusually consequential day for legal news about the media business. First, we learned that Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes on CBS, is stepping back from that role, citing concerns about his independence from corporate meddling; President Trump is suing CBS over an interview that 60 Minutes did with Kamala Harris ahead of last yearâs presidential election, and even though the suit is legally ridiculous, Paramount, which owns CBS and is currently seeking federal approval for a merger, is reportedly inclined to settle. (Owens âfought for the broadcast and for independent journalism and that cost him his job,â a source told CNNâs Jake Tapper. âIt’s shameful.â) Then, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration must halt its efforts to gut various broadcasters under the aegis of the US Agency for Global Media, in no small part because Congress voted to fund them. âIt is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions than the Defendantsâ actions here,â the judge said.
As if this wasnât enough major news, the gods of the media beat soon handed down another big story. Compared with the 60 Minutes and USAGM imbroglios, which are relatively recent, this one concerned a much longer-running drama and a central characterâSarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidateâwho can perhaps be seen as an ur-Trump. Back in 2017, after a gunman opened fire on a congressional baseball practice, Palin sued the Times for defamation over an editorial that wrongly suggested she had helped incite the shooting of a different member of Congress, Gabby Giffords, six years earlier. (Palinâs PAC had published a map with crosshairs drawn over Giffordsâs district, among others, but no link to the shooter was ever established.) The Times quickly apologized, but Palin went to court anyway. In 2022, a judge and a jury both sided with the Times, ruling that Palin had failed to establish that the paper acted with âactual maliceââor the idea that, under the high bar set by current precedent, a libel plaintiff who is a public figure must show that they were defamed intentionally or with reckless disregard for the truth. An appeals court, however, overturned the rulingâin part because the judge in the case, Jed Rakoff, had delivered his verdict while the jury was still deliberating; he hadnât intended for the jurors to find out about it, but some of them got notifications on their phones.
This week, the jury in the rerun of the trial went to deliberate. While they were out, Rakoff, who was still presiding, said that he remained unconvinced by Palinâs case, according to Slate, but that he wouldnât preempt the jury this time; âwhether I think the Second Circuit was right or wrong, I know well they are my boss,â he said, of the appeals court. After less than three hours, the jury came back and agreed with Rakoffâthe Times had won again. Palinâs lawyers have suggested in the past that they intended to use her case to overturn the aforementioned existing libel precedent, as set by the Supreme Court in the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan case and subsequent rulings; at least two justices have recently expressed sympathy with that cause, and Samantha S. Barbas, a law professor who has written a book about the Sullivan case, told the Timesâ Katie Robertson and David Enrich yesterday that Palinâs loss would further fuel its momentum, by demonstrating how high a bar âactual maliceâ presents to public figures looking to sue. (Enrich has also written a book about Sullivan and the push to overturn it; I interviewed him about it recently for CJR.) Yesterday, Palin posted on X that sheâll âkeep asking the press to quit making things upâ and called for her followers to âkeep the faith,â alongside an emoji representing the scales of justice. Missing, however, was any confirmation that she intends to keep fightingâand remarks she made outside court didnât sound very keepfightingey. Per Robertson and Enrich, she said sheâll âgo home to a beautiful familyâ and âget on with life.â (Itâs worth noting, too, that the Supreme Court recently turned down a chance to review Sullivan in a different case.)
This morning, I called Bill Grueskin, a faculty member at Columbia Journalism School and regular contributor to this newsletter and CJRâs website, to get his perspective on the verdict. Grueskin covered Palinâs suit for us back in 2020, after poring through court documents; he concluded that she faced âsignificant hurdlesâ in a legal sense, but that the record also showed âsystemic problems in the way that Times writers and editors interact, especially when operating under deadline and in distant bureaus.â Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
JA: You dug into this case for us back in 2020, before it went to trial. Some people might just have written this off as a bad-faith right-wing witch hunt against the Times and the wider media. Why did you want to go so deep into the court record, and what did you find?
BG: I dug up the court records partly because everybody had written about the lawsuit and some of the early twists and turns it had taken in the courts, but I hadnât really seen any account of what actually transpired in the newsroomâand as somebody who has spent a lot of time in newsroom management, from a small weekly paper in North Dakota to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, I was interested in, How did this thing happen? I was approaching it less from a legal point of view, although of course that was one important element of it, and more from the standpoint of: If Iâm a journalist hearing about the Palin case, what do I need to know so I donât wind up with my ass being dragged through federal court? I was surprised, when I looked at the court file, that there were already a lot of publicly available depositions from key players in the case. I basically took every deposition and pieced it together as much as I could according to a timeline that I built on a huge Google Doc. The story kind of wrote itself at that point because it was so compelling.
Fast-forward to now: Were you surprised by yesterdayâs verdict, or any of its specifics?
Thanks to Sullivan, two things can be true: you can publish or broadcast something about a public figure that is clearly false, and you can avoid being held financially liable for having done so. There are certain circumstances that apply to thatâand I donât have a law degree, so I try not to get too far out of my lane in describing what those circumstances areâbut the phrase âreckless disregard for the truthâ has to be part of it. [The way the Times op-ed was edited and published by the then editorial page editor, James Bennet] I donât think was reckless disregard for the truth, but itâs a reckless way to go about putting words on a page and onto the New York Times editorial section. I think thatâs one reason why various courts wanted this to go to trial, and it didnât get tossed out initially.
[In terms of the specifics of the verdict yesterday] it took the jury almost no time, right? It was a very quick verdict; I donât think they even had time to order dinner. I think part of the problem is that Palinâand this was true from the deposition that I read back in 2020âcould not really show any damage to her reputation. She had been a Fox commentator at the time, even after this thing ranâand God knows, an erroneous editorial about you in the New York Times is not gonna get you bounced off of Fox News; if anything, itâs gonna get you your own prime-time show. This [editorial] was up for fourteen hours or so, and they ran a correction; when you read into the depositions youâll see that once Bennet realized, just a couple of hours after it had gone up, that he was wrong, he made every good-faith effort to correct it. Thatâs an important element in defending yourself in a case like this.
Do you expect Palin to keep fighting this? Her public remarks about it yesterday were generally defiant but sounded kind of resigned, or at least vague about her intentionsâŚ
I canât imagine sheâs personally paying the legal fees for this. This thing has dragged on for years, and she does have good attorneysâthey arenât doing a crappy job of pursuing her case, itâs just that the underlying case is not that strong. So Iâve always been curious as to who is bankrolling this, because I donât think thereâs any indication, based on her depositions and other information, that Palin has the resources to mount what is clearly a multimillion-dollar process here. I think the fact that two juries and one judge have said at various times that thereâs no case here would be very discouraging to any appellate court.
If you read David Enrichâs recent book, itâs clear that thereâs a huge movement among conservative legal circles, with support from several justices on the Supreme Court, to amend Sullivan or destroy it altogether. If youâre gonna do that, you need to have a really good case, and I donât think this is the kind of case that SCOTUS would pick up.
I was about to ask you about this. On the one hand, this verdict could be seen as an explicit threat to Sullivan fading away. On the other hand, there might be a sense within the movement you just mentioned that Palin may not have been a particularly sympathetic plaintiff anywayâŚ
Itâs not so much unsympathetic; I think sheâs unsuccessful. I think she actually is somewhat sympatheticâbeing associated with this near murder of a bunch of congressmen is a pretty upsetting thing, and I donât doubt it was disconcerting to her. But thereâs no sense that somehow her hugely successful career went skidding off the rails after this editorial ran for fourteen hours in the middle of the night. Itâs just a ludicrous proposition. I would imagine conservative legal circles are gonna be looking for some semipublic figure, probably someone less public than Palin, who has a stronger case for arguing that they did suffer greatlyâeither on a personal level, being harassed or having their kids chased around, or having lost jobs or other income.
Do you see any linkages between the Palin outcome and yesterdayâs other big media news out of CBS and USAGM? On the one hand, it predates these other stories and isnât explicitly about Trump; itâs almost a portal into a different time. On the other hand, something about it has seemed to prefigure this age of intensifying right-wing attacks on the media that are now coming from inside the house. Did Palin v. New York Times walk so Trump v. CBS could run?
[For eight years] the New York Times, I think to its great credit, fought this thing tooth and nail every step of the way. I am not privy to what kind of settlement talks they may or may not have had with Palin and her attorneys, but you can imagineâyou donât have to imagine; you can see how ABC and Disney caved to Trump [in a more recent defamation case involving the anchor George Stephanopoulos, which ABC settled before Christmas]. In a perfect world, you would hope other media organizations would look at the New York Times and say, Well, goddammit, I guess we have to fight these things, too. It would be a somewhat different world if the Times had caved on the Palin case and paid her off just to go away. And they didnâtâthey stuck it out through two trials and lots of depositions.Â
Sometimes you get sued for defamation over a story thatâs basically true. In this case, they got sued over an editorial that had one important untrue paragraph in it. And they kept fighting it. They didnât try to pretend that the paragraph was fine and that Palin didnât have a case, but they said, Look, we did everything possible to correct it as quickly as we could. I think they deserve a certain amount of admiration for that. And I would hope especially that well-financed news organizations might stiffen their spines a little bit the next time somebody comes after them for whatâs basically an unfounded case.
Other notable stories:
- Yesterday, I wrote in this newsletter about Pete Hegseth, the scandal-plagued defense secretary, and the ramificationsâfor the press and for Trump himselfâof Trumpâs apparent desire not to let the press claim his scalp. Shortly after I published, Hegseth went on Fox & Friends, the show whose weekend edition he used to host; the interview got off to an inauspicious start when host Brian Kilmeade accidentally introduced Hegseth as the âformer secretary,â but that was a slip of the tongue and Hegseth soon made it clear he isnât intending to go anywhere, slamming âdisgruntled former employeesâ for leaking to the media in a bid to undermine his and Trumpâs agenda. Those staffers, however, have denied leakingâand Drop Siteâs Ryan Grim is out with a new story detailing a much more complicated internal chain of events.
- Last week, James LaPorta, of CBS, reported that Kristina Wong, the Pentagon correspondent for the right-wing outlet Breitbart, was under consideration for a job as chief spokesperson for John Phelan, the Navy secretaryâand had not disclosed this fact while continuing to cover the department. Yesterday, Wong was confirmed to the post. âThe code of ethics from the Society of Professional Journalists states that journalists should âact independentlyâ from the people and institutions they cover and âavoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,ââ LaPorta noted last week. Wong has âwritten glowing stories about the administration, for example, describing Hegseth âearning respectâ after a physical fitness session with Army Special Forces soldiers.â
- Yesterday, we noted in this newsletter that Ryan Lizza, a star journalist at Politico, had left that outlet to start a Substack and suggested, on his way out the door, that his old employerâs style of journalism isnât meeting this dangerous moment; now Lizza is alleging that a lawyer for Politico told him to delete the Substack post containing that claim, on the grounds that it violates a nondisparagement agreement. In other news about the media business, the Washington Post became the latest outlet to strike a deal with OpenAI, which will feature Post reporting in ChatGPT. And Kathleen Hennessey, an editor at the Times, will lead the Minnesota Star Tribune.
- Recently, I wrote in this newsletter about the devastating earthquake in Myanmar and how it had exacerbated an already difficult situation for the countryâs independent press, which has been persecuted by a military junta and, more recently, hit hard by Trumpâs aid cuts. Now Doh Athan, a podcast on human rights in Myanmar, is out with an episode delving into how journalists have covered the aftermath of the quake in the face of sharp official restrictions, presenting the audio journals of two freelance reporters in central Myanmar. You can listen in English here, via Frontier Myanmar.
- And in the UK, the BBCâs Amol Rajan interviewed Gary Lineker, a veteran sports broadcaster who will soon leave Match of the Day, an iconic BBC soccer highlights show that he has hosted since 1999. Lineker has been outspoken on liberal causes and was suspended by the BBC in 2023 over impartiality concerns. He suggested to Rajan that the broadcaster wanted him gone from Match of the Day, and criticized some of its editorial choices. âThe BBC tries to appease the people that hate the BBC,â he said at one point, ârather than worrying about the people that loveâ it.
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