Darrell Castle reports on the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against The New York Times for libel. Transcript Notes Sarah Palin vs The New York Times Hello this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday August 4, 2017 and on today’s Report I will be talking about a lawsuit that was filed on June 27, 2017 by Sarah Palin against The New York Times for libel. The case was filed in the Southern District of New York and assigned to Judge Jed Rakoff who has been on the Federal Bench since he was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1996. The New York Times, the gray lady, I have always thought of it as the best newspaper in the world and I have had home delivery for many years. The masthead of the Times says everything. “All the news that’s fit to print” right on the upper left column of the paper, has been synonymous with the Times since the beginning.  But according to Mrs. Palin and her legal  team, and by the Times own admission, as we will see, this time they printed something that was not fit to print. The June 14 2017 edition of the Times carried an editorial on its opinion pages entitled America’s Lethal Politics. The point of the article was to put forward the argument that political rhetoric from certain people was responsible for inciting political violence such as the violence that wounded Representative Gabby Giffords and killed six people in 2011. The article was written shortly after the attack on a Congressional baseball game that wounded Representative Steve Scalise. A quote from the Times editorial provoked Mrs. Palin to action: “Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.” So, with one brief paragraph the world’s best newspaper basically accused Mrs. Palin of inciting mass murder. Well, it turned out that no connection to the shooting was ever established because there was no connection to the shooting. Mrs. Palin’s electoral map had nothing to do with the shooting and the Times apparently knew that. Jared  Loughner was apparently a very disturbed man who had a personal fascination with representative Giffords which was not even connected to her political views.  The times quickly figured out that they had published something that they apparently knew to be false because two days later on June 16 they published the following “correction”: “An editorial on Thursday about the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise incorrectly stated that a link existed between political rhetoric and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established. The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs”. The correction was too little too late for Mrs. Palin who apparently decided that enough was enough. She contacted her lawyer in Tampa Florida who together with a New York firm filed suit on June 27, alleging libel and slander,  but Mrs. Palin is obviously a public figure and the law holds that in order to recover for such offenses a public figure must prove actual malice. What is actual malice? According to Black’s Law Dictionary it is “the deliberate intent to commit an injury, as evidenced by external circumstances.” So the defendant or the one who defames has what could be termed a qualified privilege to defame public figures. The public figure, on the other hand,