Knowingly allowing falsehoods? That's putting it mildly.
The NYT claims it owns the global franchise for accurate news reporting. The aura of self-righteousness permeates every page.
To have allowed an incompetent like Blair to sit in its newsroom and to have published Blair's work without fact-checking seems to put a very large onus on the editors for misleading readers.
Deliberately ignoring its established editing guidelines to print Blair's "falsehoods" would make the NYT complicit in the deception.
The NYT treated their readers as if they were raising mushrooms, that is, they kept them in the dark and fed them lots of horse manure.