The Free Press reported that The New York Times‘ shareholders have sued the paper over its anti-Israel coverage.
“The Company’s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company’s internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion that in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors,” according to the lawsuit.
The State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) first demanded internal records on May 29, 2026, accusing the board of directors and senior management of failing to “discharge their fiduciary duties with respect to material legal, reputational, and financial risks arising from the Company’s publication of factually unsupported content.”
They pointed to Nicholas Kristof’s absurd column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians” and the paper’s defense of Kristof, “Your Questions About Nicholas Kristof’s Column on Palestinians and Sexual Assault.”
Israel even threatened to sue the Times over the column.
In July, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the shareholders threatened to file a lawsuit over the refusal to send the internal records and accused the board of abdicating “its basic oversight duties.”
The Washington Free Beacon obtained the demand letter, noting the concerns heightened after “a string of controversial Times reports that sought to discredit Israel or support anti-Israel Democratic politicians such as Graham Platner.”
Well, the Times didn’t listen and now faces a lawsuit.
The shareholders included evidence from a whistleblower who worked the paper’s video desk. The whistleblower’s concerns were brushed aside and met with retaliation:
Beginning in 2019, and on at least fifteen separate occasions, the Whistleblower used the very channels the Company holds out for reporting standards violations-EthicsPoint, the Standards desk, Employee Relations, and Human Resources—to raise concerns about broken standards. Those channels turned on her rather than address what she reported.
The Whistleblower’s desk supervisor ordered that future complaints be routed through the exact supervisor her complaints concerned. The Standards desk confirmed the rerouting in writing and apologized that she had gotten “in trouble of some kind” for escalating. Human Resources then asked her to edit or delete an internal Slack message supporting Jewish colleagues.
Yet the staffers who engaged in public advocacy on the war in favor of Palestine, which she reported through the same channels, received, so far as she is aware, no such request to edit or delete their support. Her desk supervisor told her that “it’s not your job to be the ombudsman of the New York Times,” a position eliminated by the Company in 2017 that was never replaced. She was told that colleagues were “reluctant to work with” her, and she told Human Resources, on tape, that her desk head had instructed her not to escalate concerns about bias beyond her.
“The public deserves a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved,” the whistleblower told The Free Press.
The whistleblower had at least 15 instances of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias cross her desk between 2019 and March 2026, when she left her job. Her account starts on page 26, but I’ll highlight a few:
- On October 18, 2023, Standards issued guidance on how casualty claims from Gaza were to be attributed: “The Palestinian Health Ministry is the Gaza health ministry, or the health ministry run by Hamas.” But when a video journalist on the Whistleblower’s desk was instructed to conform a story to that guidance, other staff objected that the guidance applied only “going forward,” and the published material stayed as it was: the story ran attributing the casualty count to “Health officials” rather than clarifying those officials were Hamas officials. On November 7, 2023, the Whistleblower showed the exchange, together with several other staffers’ messages supporting the decision to disregard the guidance, to deputy Standards editor, who called it “a display of group think on the video desk.” Petitioners’ counsel has seen nothing indicating that the guidance was then enforced or the story revised.
- In the Company’s October 25, 2023 recounting of the Hamas attack on Ofakim (a southern Israeli city attacked on October 7), staff twice changed the accurate description of “terrorists” to the neutral “men.” The Standards note in the same editing record had “asked that we just scale back the use of ‘terrorists’ for repetition sake,” and the substitution that note yielded elsewhere in the same article was “assailants.” The word “men” was the desk’s choice, not Standards.’
- Beginning around October 2023, staffers at the Whistleblower’s desk spent weeks seeking evidence that the tunnels beneath Al-Shifa Hospital (the largest medical complex in the Gaza strip) were used solely for civilian rather than military, Hamas purposes. One reporter asked the Whistleblower to search an Israeli architectural archive for the hospital’s original plans. The effort to whitewash Hamas’ use of hospitals even continued after the Israeli military published footage of the tunnels in November 2023 which included weapons and ammunition. On February 12, 2024, the Company published its own analysis, which concluded that Hamas had used the hospital for cover, stored weapons inside it, and maintained a tunnel beneath the complex. The desk’s internal project database nonetheless described the evidence as showing that Hamas used the facilities but that “the scale of their operations were overhyped by the IDF,” and on November 20, 2023, after the Israeli military had begun publishing footage of the tunnels, the head of the video department referred to them in the desk’s morning meeting as “alleged tunnels.”
The whistleblower also flagged a December 16, 2023, article that described the IDF as “Israeli occupation forces.”
The whistleblower protested when she saw a video summary “describing the Israeli hostages as ‘the roughly 130 people believed to be held hostage in Gaza.’” The paper changed it when the whistleblower asked, “Do we need ‘believed to be’?”
I cannot imagine what else the whistleblower caught.
The shareholders claim the failure to address the whistleblower’s concerns shows the following:
- The Company’s standards system failed each time it was tested.
- Notice of the failures reached two sitting directors: the Chief Executive Officer, who sat in a December 2023 company-wide meeting at which it was reported that complaints about the framing of the Company’s war coverage had already come up from a number of desks, and the Chairman, whose written 2019 commitment to antisemitism training remains unkept more than five years later.
- No oversight followed. That record is set out in the Whistleblower’s own eyewitness accounts, including recordings, internal complaints, Slack messages, and a twenty-six-slide presentation reflecting Board-level abdication of duty.
The shareholders point out that the public record alone warrants an inspection:
- On August 20, 2026, a federal jury in Alabama found the Company liable for defamation and awarded $9.25 million, most of it in punitive damages, to a former University of Alabama basketball player, in what the Company itself has described as its first defamation loss at trial in more than fifty years. The trial record shows the reporter and standards editor questioned the article’s sourcing yet the Company refused retraction in the face of denials including by the University and the subject of the article. Bill Grueskin, How the Times Lost a Defamation Trial, Columbia Journalism Review (Sept. 16, 2026), available at: https://www.cjr.org/news/howthe-new-york-times-lost-defamation-trial-university alabama-basketball-shootingwitz-spears.php.
- A peer-reviewed study has counted seventy-two errors the Company admitted in its own corrections column, in a single coverage area, in eight months. Eytan Gilboa & Lilac Sigan, The New York Times Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War: Errors, Omissions, and Poor Editorial Supervision, 30 Israel Affairs 939 (2024).
- The Company has repeatedly conceded in writing, after the fact and only after outside pressure, that published work did not meet its own standards: a front-page photograph whose caption the Company revised after its own records were shown to contradict it, an editors’ note admitting that its coverage of a hospital explosion “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas,” and a columnist’s undisclosed financial relationships with the people he quoted.
- A peer-reviewed study found substantial imbalance in the coverage of the Israel-Hamas events transpiring since October 7, 2023, in favor of Palestinians and Lebanese, concluding that these “imbalances in the reporting of the war . . .could plausibly influence the opinions of readers in a direction that is at odds with reality.” Edieal Pinker, How the New York Times Framed the War Between Israel and Hamas, STUDIES IN CONFLICT & TERRORISM (2026).
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.