Seriously, I'd be more worried if a candidate didn't respond.
Really now?
I realize that the most conventional of conventional wisdom states that thou shalt always suck up to the press, which is why we end up with things like candidates holding cookouts with reporters and why we are forever getting top columnists writing about how the real problem with president or potential president so-and-so is that they simply don't get how to treat the Very Damn Important People of Washington, i.e. the columnists themselves, but the Times story was conspicuously and inarguably terrible. It was a botched story, through and through. The paper had to fumble through two corrections to get something even remotely resembling reality, moving from an initial version that existed for no other reason than to imply that Hillary Clinton might be being "investigated" for something "criminal" to having to (eventually, and with much apparent resistance) walk back both parts of that claim as being untrue.
That is a big deal. It made the Times look bad, and it should have made the Times look bad, and there are very real remaining questions about just how this heavily spun, fictitious version of events managed to make its way from Republican conspiracy theory to one of the nation's top papers with little fact-checking and mysterious "sources" that may or may not consist of Trey Gowdy on a pill bender. It was a false story, peddled by someone with an obvious interest in manufacturing controversy over the Democratic front-runner. It was propaganda.
So yes, the Clinton camp has more than a little basis for being angry about that. And reporters should be angry about it, and readers should be angry about it, and anyone who gives two damns for democracy as anything more than a contest to fling the biggest, most egregious falsehoods and gain power doing it should be angry about it. Whatever idiot "source" pulled the con on the Times to get them to print a false story should have been outed already—alas, it is someone important enough that the paper apparently does not want to lose access to them, even if they caused the paper to publish a substandard, substanceless, and fraudulent version of events—and the Times should be deep in internal reflections as to whether or not they want their paper to be used as the Weekly World News of political hit jobs and conspiracy theories.
We can't possibly think that Hillary Clinton needs to accept the press publishing blatantly false stories about her, lest she look like she is picking a fight, can we? Are we really at that point? Where the press should just print whatever hokum they want, based on garbage stories or the rantings of "anonymous" political hacks, but the bigger sin would be for a candidate to have the lack of class to be peeved by that?
We can't really be at the point of politics where we are not arguing over whether it is proper for papers to print false stories brought to them by anonymous liars, but tsking as pundits over the political wisdom of a candidate "picking a fight" with a paper that does it?