Some personal news. Delighted this is now official, and can’t wait to get started in January.
Jon Allsop
@jonallsop.bsky.social
1.3K followers 333 following 45 posts
Contributing writer at The New Yorker. Formerly ran newsletters at CJR. Author: What is Journalism For? Other words in the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
![Do you see any linkages between the Palin outcome and yesterday’s other big media news out of CBS and USAGM? On the one hand, it predates these other stories and isn’t explicitly about Trump; it’s almost a portal into a different time. On the other hand, something about it has seemed to prefigure this age of intensifying right-wing attacks on the media that are now coming from inside the house. Did Palin v. New York Times walk so Trump v. CBS could run?
[For eight years] the New York Times, I think to its great credit, fought this thing tooth and nail every step of the way. I am not privy to what kind of settlement talks they may or may not have had with Palin and her attorneys, but you can imagine—you don’t have to imagine; you can see how ABC and Disney caved to Trump [in a more recent defamation case involving the anchor George Stephanopoulos, which ABC settled before Christmas]. In a perfect world, you would hope other media organizations would look at the New York Times and say, Well, goddammit, I guess we have to fight these things, too. It would be a somewhat different world if the Times had caved on the Palin case and paid her off just to go away. And they didn’t—they stuck it out through two trials and lots of depositions.
Sometimes you get sued for defamation over a story that’s basically true. In this case, they got sued over an editorial that had one important untrue paragraph in it. And they kept fighting it. They didn’t try to pretend that the paragraph was fine and that Palin didn’t have a case, but they said, Look, we did everything possible to correct it as quickly as we could. I think they deserve a certain amount of admiration for that. And I would hope especially that well-financed news organizations might stiffen their spines a little bit the next time somebody comes after them for what’s basically an unfounded case.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:svawqo4jxobyyuqmixplvcux/bafkreiasot2umcxriri4f6rfelooh65fsc7dfopxd34ubn2roowb2pxgci)
