A judge recently green-lit Sarah Palin's lawsuit vs the NYT.

How did the Times' editorial page and its former editor, James Bennet, get into this fix?

I've read thousands of pages of depositions, emails, story drafts and texts. Here's my @CJR story:

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/how-the-new-york-times-editorial-page-got-sued-by-sarah-palin.php 1/

It starts in 2011, when a gunman killed 6 & wounded others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Some initially blamed Palin for a map her PAC had promoted, with stylized crosshairs on 20 districts.

There was no evidence the assassin had seen the map.

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/how-the-new-york-times-editorial-page-got-sued-by-sarah-palin.php 2/

Then move to 2017, when a gunman shot several people, including Rep. Steve Scalise, at a baseball practice.

A DC-based edit-page writer sent in a first draft, mentioning the map but not as an incitement.

Then, she said, NY editors "did what they were going to do" 3/

Bennet dove in and added sentences linking the 2011 shooting to Palin's map.

Shortly after it went online, Twitter exploded.

Bennet sent texts to the staffer who wrote the original editorial. He acknowledged, "I just moved too fast. I'm sorry."

https://www.cjr.org/opinion/how-the-new-york-times-editorial-page-got-sued-by-sarah-palin.php 4/

By the next day, the Times edit page was in a state. They knew they had a huge problem. They ran one correction, then added another.

It didn't matter. Palin filed suit several days later. 5/

Palin is claiming defamation. Her rationale is that it disrupted her relationship with Fox News (even though she continued to work for them and got another contract).

She also defended the use of the word "aim" in her brochure, with a reference to moose hunters:

6/

When AG Sulzberger, the NYT publisher, announced Bennet's departure last June in the wake of the Tom Cotton op-ed, he noted that it represented "a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years.”

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