Under current conditions, to win a libel lawsuit is very difficult but not impossible. Most of the time people who win a lawsuit are either major cases involving multimillion dollar lawsuits or private figures about whom a newspaper recklessly screwed up a story. For example, one of my former newspapers almost printed the wrong mug shot by switching a minor criminal's photo with an accused murderer of very similar names, and if that hadn't been caught at the last minute we all would have been in REALLY deep kimchi.
My job got saved because I kept a page proof that ordinarily would have been thrown away which proved that the page, as I had approved it, did **NOT** have the wrong photo and the photo got switched later in the process. I learned (to the undying frustration of my family and subsequent editors since then) never, ever, ever, to throw **ANYTHING** away that might have the remotest possibility of being needed later.
That's a concrete example of what it means to avoid “reckless disregard for the truth.” Newspapers, when they screw up (and they all do, since there's no way to print tens of thousands of words every day without mistakes) need to be able to prove that they had a process in place to prevent the screwup.
Documenting lack of actual malice is more complicated and it doesn't apply to the sort of case we're discussing. It's more of a situation excusing unintentional screwups for which a newspaper can't be shown to have intended any deliberate harm and in fact printed a quick correction or retraction or clarification to fix the problem.
Your responses are valuable to me because they come from a newspaperman who has first-hand experience. Again, thank you.
I see things differently though. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve written a news report for any broadcast medium. All I know is that, even then in the ‘90s and especially from the ‘60s through the ‘80s, I could never have gotten away with writing or saying “So-and-so is a liar” without dealing with terminal consequences if anyone noticed and complained.
That fact that the writer of the article in this thread wrote what he wrote proves to me his intent was to harm Palin if not her family members. He didn’t just (unintentionally) mix up her picture with Julianne Moore’s.