The New York Times's embarrassing defense in the Project Veritas case

It's big news that a justice of the New York state Supreme Court has allowed a libel suit by the conservative activist group Project Veritas against the New York Times to go forward. The outlet had asked the judge to throw out the suit, but in a 16-page opinion Friday, Justice Charles Wood ruled that there is "a substantial basis in law to proceed" and that Project Veritas "is entitled to try to establish whether the New York Times writers were purposely and/or recklessly inaccurate, sloppy, or something less."
...
Early arguments in the case included remarkable exchanges between New York Times lawyers, Project Veritas lawyers, and Judge Wood. But from the standpoint of readers interested in the state of journalism today, perhaps the most remarkable was the outlet's defense that Astor and Hsu, both news reporters, freely injected opinion into their reports. Even though the stories were published in the news section of the paper, the New York Times argued, Project Veritas was not entitled to sue for libel because the opinions expressed were "unverifiable." "Unverifiable expressions of opinion are not actionable and cannot be defamatory," the paper argued in its motion to dismiss the case. "A defamation action must be based on statements of objective fact, not on an expression of opinion, which by definition cannot be true or false ... In this politically-charged context, the term 'deceptive' is not susceptible to an objective meaning and is therefore a non-actionable opinion."

"The use of the term 'deceptive,'" the New York Times concluded, is "non-actionable pure opinion."