The New York Times is hoping to make Sarah Palin's lawsuit go away by claiming that her lawyers can't prove that it was intentional. Or, at least, malicious.
As the Times' lawyer put it, it was an "honest mistake".
Of course there was nothing honest about the supposed paper of record repeating a discredited lie for which there has never been a scintilla of evidence. And in the age of Wikipedia at that/
Obviously proving motive is difficult even when everyone knows what the motive was. And yet haven't we long since passed the boundary when smears by the New York Times can be considered a mistake.
It's not as if the fact in question was obscure or open to debate. The Times has plenty of lawyers. It has fact checkers. This wasn't an error. An error would have been easily caught. A whole lot of people see a Times piece before it goes out. It boggles the mind that none of them knew that they were running fake news.
No one caught it, because the paper feels free to hit Republicans with any smear... no matter how unfounded.
And Palin is a particular target,
Everyone knows what the motive is.