A New York federal jury on Tuesday found The New York Times (NYT) not liable for libel against 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor filed suit in 2017, stating that the NYT damaged her reputation by erroneously linking her to a mass shooting in an editorial piece.

The opinion piece, titled “America’s Lethal Politics,” written by James Bennett, included a statement saying that Palin’s political rhetoric helped incite the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona that severely injured then US Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and killed six others. The editorial was corrected 14 hours later and conceded that the wording included was erroneous. Palin responded that what the newspaper did was not enough, and she was seeking damages for reputational harm.

A previous jury in 2022 came to the same conclusion, finding the NYT not liable, but the issue was sent to an appeals court. Both juries stuck to the long-established legal protections that safeguard American media against defamation claims from public figures. A jury instruction provided in this trial references this requirement, stating that the jury must:

Decide whether, at the time he revised the editorial, Mr. Bennet either actually knew that the challenged statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it was false, meaning that he knew there was a high probability that it was false but consciously chose to disregard that risk.

The First Amendment protects American media from defamation suits from public figures unless the public figure can prove that there was actual malice behind the statements.