IMHO... the fact that the NYT subsidiary, the Boston Globe, was caught faking photos of "prisoner abuse" and reporting them as "hard news" makes the NYT very, very vulnarable to suit right now.
The Jayson Blair fiasco and other out in the open messes as well as the Globe phony sex abuse pictures to me are open cases of fraud. They used this bs instead of real news reporting to harm GW and dared to call it news until they were caught.