Ex-New York Times Editor Says He Panicked After Botching Sarah Palin Column
James Bennet, the ousted New York Times editor at the center of a defamation lawsuit brought by Sarah Palin, described a frantic struggle on Wednesday in recounting how his “failure” produced a column that wrongly connected the ex-governor to a mass shooting.
Palin briefly took the stand Wednesday afternoon, her “golly!”-laden testimony making for a sharp contrast with the prestige journalist. But it was Bennet who once again played the star in a high-stakes drama pitting the news media against its subjects.
Bennet, who left the Times in June 2020 amid internal backlash to another column, reiterated during his second day of testimony that he was responsible for a now-infamous 2017 piece entitled “America’s Lethal Politics.” The column erroneously suggested that the former Alaska governor’s political action committee and her rhetoric had incited a 2011 Arizona mass shooting that killed six people and severely injured then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.