NEW YORK — A former New York Times opinion editor being sued along with his ex-employer by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin fell on his sword Tuesday by insisting the error at the heart of the case was all on him.
“This is my fault,” James Bennet told a Manhattan Federal Court jury. “I mean, I wrote those sentences, and I’m not looking to shift the blame to anybody else. So, I just, like, for the record, I want to say that.”
Bennet’s mea culpa came on the fourth day of the libel trial.
He said he didn’t mean to suggest that provocative political literature circulated by Palin’s political action committee had incited a 2011 mass shooting when he edited an editorial to describe a “clear” and “direct” link between the two.
The Times promptly corrected the editorial, but Palin’s lawyers argue the newspaper didn’t act quickly enough.
The editorial, headlined “America’s Lethal Politics,” ran on June 14, 2017, in the wake of a mass shooting at congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia. James Hodgkinson seriously wounded Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., and others in the sniper-style attack.
The Times editorial said that Hodgkinson was a devout Bernie Sanders supporter and argued that heated political rhetoric on both sides of the aisle provoked real-world gun violence.
“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably,” reads the piece.
To bolster this contention, Bennet pointed to a 2011 mass shooting at a Tucson, Arizona, shopping mall event held by former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz. Jared Lee Loughner killed six people, including a 9-year-old girl, and gravely wounded the congresswoman.
Writing of “a sickeningly familiar pattern,” Bennet wrote that “the link to political incitement was clear” in the Giffords shooting. He connected it with a poster distributed by Palin’s PAC, which he incorrectly wrote featured stylized rifle-scope type crosshairs over 20 Democrats, including Giffords.
The graphic featured crosshairs over the Democrats’ districts, not the officials themselves. And there was no evidence that Loughner, who was mentally ill, had ever seen the map.
Palin, who must prove Bennet and The Times acted with “actual malice” to win the suit, has argued that internal emails prove he knew the information was false but ran it anyway.
The emails show that the editorial’s original writer, Elizabeth Williamson, included a link in her initial draft to an ABC article disputing a connection between the map and the Loughner shooting.
Williamson took the stand last week and said her initial pitch centered around gun policy. But Bennet sent her back to the drawing board, she testified, asking her in an email to make a point “about the rhetoric of demonization (and) whether it incites people to this kind of violence.”
Bennet said he got Williamson’s copy on deadline and added the errors when he rewrote it.
“I really reworked this one. I hope you can see what I was trying to do,” Bennet emailed Williamson after. “I’m sorry to do such a heavy edit.”
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