Here is what the Times originally wrote in its editorial:
Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.
The Times, after much public backlash from even Palin’s harshest critics on the left and right, then issued two subsequent corrections.
After adding that “no connection to the shooting was ever established” to its original editorial, the Times issued this correction on June 15:
An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly stated that a link existed between political incitement and the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords. In fact, no such link was established.
But the Times never corrected that it had falsely stated that Palin had put “Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs” when Palin did no such thing.
Later in the day on June 15, the Times edited its editorial again to note that Palin’s map “showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”
It then issued its second correction:
The editorial also incorrectly described a map distributed by a political action committee before that shooting. It depicted electoral districts, not individual Democratic lawmakers, beneath stylized cross hairs.
Yet, in a statement to CNN, the Times insisted that their errors did not “undercut or weaken the argument of the piece.”
Palin’s lawyers pointed out that “despite recognizing that its statements about Mrs. Palin in the June 14, 2017 column ‘America’s Lethal Politics’ are not true, The Times repeatedly failed to meaningfully retract or correct its column and apologize to Mrs. Palin for publishing it. Rather, The Times issued a statement affirming that its ‘error doesn’t undercut or weaken the argument of the piece.’”
To prove that the Times had “ample facts available that established that there was no connection between Mrs. Palin and Loughner’s crime,” the lawyers point to an article the Times published on January 15, 2011, that “recognized that no direct or clear link between political rhetoric and Loughner’s actions could be claimed.” In addition, the lawyers point out that New York Times columnist Charles Blow once wrote that “the only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting” of Giffords.