Palin v. New York Times Heads Back to Trial

Sarah Palin’s yearslong defamation case against The New York Times, potentially testing the extent of First Amendment protections for journalists, will soon go to trial in federal court in Manhattan.

Again.

Three years ago, a federal jury and judge each ruled against Ms. Palin, the onetime Republican vice-presidential nominee and Alaska governor. She had claimed that an editorial that The Times published in 2017 had defamed her by wrongly suggesting that an ad from her political action committee had inspired a mass shooting.

But Ms. Palin successfully appealed the verdict, and a retrial was ordered. It is scheduled to begin on Monday.

Much of the trial is expected to be a repeat of the first. Most of the witnesses, evidence and legal arguments will be the same, including The Times’s defense that its mistakes were inadvertent and did not harm Ms. Palin. The same federal judge, Jed S. Rakoff, will be presiding in the same courtroom in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

What has changed is the country. Trust in the media has declined, and the Manhattan jury pool may have shifted to the right. A number of defamation lawsuits in the past three years have resulted in eye-popping payments, raising the stakes in the Palin case. And the retrial comes as President Trump and his administration have attacked the notion of an independent press, deploying litigation, investigations and other strong-arm tactics against news organizations.

If Ms. Palin prevails, Mr. Trump and his allies will almost certainly promote the victory as a powerful rebuke of the press. Her lawyers have said they hope to use the case as a vehicle to get the Supreme Court to reconsider longstanding precedents that make it harder for public figures to win lawsuits against journalists and others.