Pailin gets a second chance. LM Otero / Associated Press.
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Appeals Court Revives Sarah Palin’s Defamation Lawsuit Against New York Times.
I’m sure you heard where Palin lost a case against the NY Times. What you didn’t hear was that the sitting judge dismissed the case while the jury was deliberating the case. The jury was given the judge’s decision and guess what? They ruled against Palin. But not the end of the case.
A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit held Wednesday that Rakoff had acted improperly and ordered a new trial.
We first reinstated the case in August 2019 following an initial dismissal by the district court (Rakoff, J.) under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). Palin’s claim was subsequently tried before a jury but, while the jury was deliberating, the district court dismissed the case again—this time under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 50. We conclude that the district court’s Rule 50 ruling improperly intruded on the province of the jury by making credibility determinations, weighing evidence, and ignoring facts or inferences that a reasonable juror could plausibly have found to support Palin’s case.
DeSantis makes a fool out of the NY Times. Authorities just arrested 8 suspected terrorists with ties to ISIS who crossed the southern border.
Last year DeSantis spoke of how terrorists were coming here by way of the southern border. But the NY Times fact check said no way. The border is secure and every terrorist that tried to cross were caught.
“Mr. Erwin was born in 1942 in Tyler, Texas, where the Black community lived on the north side of town, the whites lived on the south side and Black people did not cross Front Street after sundown.”
“And Black people did not cross Front Street after sundown”??? But whites felt free to stroll around the black part of town any time of day?
It’s the incessant myth of WHITE PEOPLE PREYING ON BLACKS!
In case you’re wondering, even in the 1940s, the black murder rate was many, many times higher than the white murder rate:
You probably think the job of a reporter is to report news. How old-fashioned, cis-gendered, white supremacist of you! That’s not it at all, certainly not at the august New York Times.
Instead, a reporter’s mission is to find out what kind of story would help the Democrats at any particular moment in time, and then write it, no matter how preposterous. Obviously, skills in sophistry and legerdemain are crucial.
Right now, nothing would help the Democratic Party more than somehow blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida from becoming the Republican presidential nominee.
That’s a tall order. DeSantis is not only running on 70-30popular issues, but he’s following through by actually enacting those policies — on everything from immigration to crime, to trans-mania, to anti-whiteracism. Most spectacularly, he made utter fools of the entire liberal brain trust over COVID.
This cannot stand. There’s a whole world of Times readers waiting for Pravda to land on their doorstep every morning to confirm their prejudices.
So what’s a liberal lackey to do?
I can now reveal the six takedown techniques taught to Times reporters on Day One — before they’re even taught that misgendering someone is a fireable offense — as illustrated by journalists Sharon LaFraniere, Patricia Mazzei and Albert Sun, in a million-word, front-page article on July 23.
1) The Kamikaze Run
Hit a person on his strongest point — he’ll never expect it. If the target’s loyal, call him disloyal; if he’s consistent, call him inconsistent; if he’s honest, call him a liar; if he’s good-looking, call him ugly.
And if he performed brilliantly during a global pandemic when almost all other government officials blundered, write an article saying: HEY, GOV! YOUR COVID RESPONSE SUCKED.
2) The Shocker Headline
Use a scary headline belied by the actual facts presented in your article.
Actual NYT headline: “The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’s Vaccine Turnabout … a grim chapter he now leaves out of his rosy retelling of his pandemic response.”
3) Hide the Ball
Deep within the story, bury the central fact that blows apart your narrative. Most likely, the reader will never get that far.
NYT, paragraph 6,000: “Overall, [Florida’s] death rate during the pandemic, adjusted for age, ended up better than the national average.”
4) The Ant’s Eye View
Find a brief, aberrational moment during the relevant time period that supports your phony premise.
NYT: “Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave … With less than 7% of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14% of deaths between the start of July [2021] and the end of October.”
That’s four months out of a three-year-long pandemic. During that precious interval, Florida’s death rate was, in fact, higher than the national average — as opposed to across the whole pandemic, when Florida’s death rate waslower than the national average.
5) “Huh. We Forgot That.”
Do not mention other, more likely, explanations for the aberration.
Like all airborne viruses, COVID hit southern states hardest in the summer (when people are crowded inside for the air conditioning) and northern states hardest in the winter (when people are crowded inside for the heat).
If you didn’t already know that, it was being reported everywhereat the time. Here, for example, is NPR in the fall of 2021: “We’re certainly seeing [COVID conditions improve] throughout Florida, South Carolina, southern Texas in particular. … [But as] the surge eases in the South, it could ramp up in the North, like last year.”
Just last week, the Times quoted a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist who noted that: “This is the fourth summer now that we see a [COVID] wave beginning around July, often starting in the South.”
Won’t well-informed Times readers know this? Absolutely not. For Times readers, the world began this morning and ended this morning.
5) The Imaginary Causation
Ignore painfully obvious facts that ruin your bogus theory of causation.
Your thesis: COVID deaths soared in Florida during the Delta wave because Gov. Death-Santis did not encourage young people to get vaccinated.
In fact, it was the Delta variant that couldn’t be stopped by vaccination, finally forcing the CDC to admit that vaccination would not prevent either infection or transmission.
As CNN reported in July 2021: “CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said new data had convinced her the Delta variant was ‘behaving uniquely’ … [and] the evidence indicated that fully vaccinated people who have breakthrough infections involving Delta may be as likely to transmit virus to others as unvaccinated people are.”
6) The “What Isn’t Like the Other” Statistic
Lard your article with statistics made meaningless by combining like and unalike things.
— “Of the 23,000 Floridians who died [during the Delta wave], 9,000 were younger than 65.”
OK, but how many were younger than 60? Is there no difference between a 23-year-old and a 63-year-old? Also, how many were obese? How many had co-morbidities?
— “Despite the governor’s insistence at the time that ‘our entire vulnerable population has basically been vaccinated,’ a vast majority of the 23,000 were either unvaccinated or had not yet completed the two-dose regimen.”
“Unvaccinated” is completely different from “got one shot,” i.e., “basically vaccinated.” For all we know, everybody who died from Delta in Florida had had at least one shot, contradicting the whole point of that statistic.
To use a professional journalist’s technique: This Is the Steep Cost of the Times’ Descent Into Mindless Left-Wing Activism … a grim chapter the paper leaves out of its history.
Winning. Twitter goes after misinformation from the extreme left. Can you hear the howling coming from the fanatics on the left? State affiliated, Misinformation, Fake News, just some of the labels being put on some of the old dinosaurs on the extreme left.
Fact checking the Pinocchio guy at the WP. Taking NY Times blue check away .Labeling NPR State Affiliated. Anthe future.d I’m sure we will see more in
Reprint. Now this is a Judge who speaks the truth. Now if you read the whole article, you’ll see that Judge Silberman is spot on. His disent should be discussed at every law school.
The case centers on a 2018 report from Global Witness Publishing that accused Liberian government officials Christiana Tah and Randolph McClain of accepting bribes from Exxon. Tah and McClain sued Global Witness alleging defamation and their claims were dismissed in Friday’s ruling.
However, in the course of his partial dissent, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman went on an unprecedented written tirade against the press, in which he argued that the Supreme Court should revisit the landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan ruling that granted the media broad First Amendment protections from being sued by public officials.
“[N]ew considerations have arisen over the last 50 years that make the New York Times decision (which I believe I have faithfully applied in my dissent) a threat to American Democracy,” he write. “It must go.”
“The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions,” said Silberman, who was nominated to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan and has been a senior judge on the D.C. Circuit Court since 2000.
“Although the bias against the Republican Party—not just controversial individuals—is rather shocking today, this is not new; it is a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s,” Silberman wrote. “Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.”
He accused Silicon Valley of filtering news “in ways favorable to the Democratic Party” and fueling censorship, citing the suppression of the New York Post’s bombshell reporting on Hunter Biden in the final weeks of the 2020 presidential election.
“It is well-accepted that viewpoint discrimination ‘raises the specter that the Government may effectively drive certain ideas or viewpoints from the marketplace,'” Silberman said. “But ideological homogeneity in the media—or in the channels of information distribution—risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.”
Silberman also sounded the alarm about the “serious efforts to muzzle” outlets like Fox News that aren’t under “Democratic Party ideological control.”
“It should be borne in mind that the first step taken by any potential authoritarian or dictatorial regime is to gain control of communications, particularly the delivery of news. It is fair to conclude, therefore, that one-party control of the press and media is a threat to a viable democracy,” the judge continued. “It may even give rise to countervailing extremism.
“The First Amendment guarantees a free press to foster a vibrant trade in ideas. But a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its willingness—if not eagerness—to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’ power.”
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