Business News for Feb. 10, 2022

“They lied before,” she said. “My view was The New York Times took a lot of liberties and wasn’t always truthful.”

And as she continued to press this point, the judge in the case, Jed S. Rakoff, asked her to be more specific.

Ms. Palin replied, “I don’t have the specific articles in front of me,” and the lawyers for both sides exited the courtroom for a lengthy sidebar with the judge.

The editorial that prompted Ms. Palin to sue — and that she testified had made her feel “powerless” and “mortified” — lamented the nation’s increasingly heated political discourse. It was written after a shooting at a congressional baseball team practice in June 2017 left Representative Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana, gravely wounded.

As James Bennet, The Times’s opinion editor at the time, was editing the piece, he inserted an incorrect reference to a 2010 map from Ms. Palin’s political action committee that included illustrations of cross hairs over 20 House districts held by Democrats. The Times corrected the editorial the morning after it was published.

Ms. Palin’s day in court ended with both sides in the case resting. Closing arguments will take place on Friday, and the jury could start deliberating that afternoon.

Ms. Palin’s re-emergence into the national spotlight at the libel trial was in many ways fitting for a figure who established her political persona as an antagonist of powerful people and institutions.

Her more than three hours of testimony offered glimpses of the former Tea Party star who relished her public battles with former President Barack Obama, high-profile journalists like Katie Couric and the leaders of her own Republican Party — the “Sarah Barracuda,” as she was memorably nicknamed by her high school basketball teammates and branded by the McCain campaign.

When Mr. Axelrod had his opportunity to question Ms. Palin on Thursday, he first tried to establish that she was hardly the “David” figure she claimed to be, and then ran through a list of network television appearances she had made around the time the editorial was published, including one short stint on the reality show “The Masked Singer.”

At this, Ms. Palin interjected. “Objection!” she said, drawing laughter from the courtroom. Asked by Mr. Axelrod why she had done that — it is her lawyer’s job to register an objection — Ms. Palin responded, “I just thought it was funny.”

Though former President Donald J. Trump regularly attacked the media by declaring them the “enemy of the people” and “fake news,” it was Ms. Palin who memorably went there before he did, captivating and insulting a mainstream press that she accused of asking “gotcha questions” of her and implored to “quit making things up.”

She was accused of making things up herself, sometimes with major ramifications for American politics. In 2009, she wrote a post on Facebook that falsely claimed the Affordable Care Act championed by Mr. Obama would subject Americans to “death panels” that would decide who was eligible for lifesaving medical treatment. PolitiFact rated it the “Lie of the Year,” and Mr. Obama felt compelled to refute the claim in an address to a joint session of Congress because it had gained such traction in conservative media.

That was back when Ms. Palin was the Republican Party’s biggest star and widely thought of as a future presidential contender, though she never ran.

The subject of Ms. Palin’s devalued political stock became a relevant point in the trial because her lawyers claimed that her loss of influence and popularity was part of the reason she was so harmed by the erroneous claim in the editorial.

When one of her lawyers asked her to explain what kind of political work she was doing, she answered that it had slowed down considerably. “There aren’t really as many requests for that kind of assistance,” she said.

Ms. Palin explained on Wednesday, when she began her testimony, that she was now spending most of her time in her hometown, Wasilla, Alaska, where she was “holding down the fort” as a single mother raising a child with special needs. She and her husband, Todd, divorced in 2020.

The Times rested its case on Thursday by calling a witness it intended to establish one of the key arguments in its defense. Hanna Ingber, a Times editor who was involved in pushing the correction to social media, testified that she had suggested posting it on Twitter because “we wanted as many readers as possible to know.” The newspaper’s lawyers have said, and other witnesses have testified, that the editors and writers who worked on the piece were deeply concerned about the error after it came to their attention and tried to correct it in as transparent a fashion as possible.

Ms. Palin and her lawyers have argued the opposite. The Times, they said, was halfhearted in its correction, which failed to mention Ms. Palin or her political action committee.

“When a bell is rung, you can’t unring the bell,” Ms. Palin said from the stand on Thursday.