![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/New-York-Times-office-building-GettyImages-1027689422-resize.avif\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThe New York Times building was the scene of a demonstration over a cartoon with anti-Semitic imagery in its international issue. (Angela Weiss\/AFP\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
And in the 175 years since the paper\u2019s founding on Sept. 18, 1851, no issue has inflamed its Jewish readers like its coverage of Israel. This month, as the Times celebrities its 175th birthday with a series of special features, that argument has gotten new fuel.<\/p>\n
On Sept. 23, the Florida state pension fund and a conservative think tank that includes shareholders in the Times sued the company, seeking internal records that they say could show whether its board has adequately overseen the newspaper\u2019s coverage of Israel. The plaintiffs allege that repeated errors and other evidence point to a failure to enforce the paper\u2019s own journalistic standards and reflect an anti-Israel bias in its coverage. <\/p>\n
The Times called the suit meritless and politically motivated, saying it amounted to an attempt to pressure an independent news organization.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit came days after the publication of a study by Edieal Pinker, a professor at Yale\u2019s School of Management, which is also cited in the lawsuit. Pinker\u2019s study attempts to put numbers behind a complaint made by supporters of Israel: that the Times\u2019 coverage of the war that began with Hamas\u2019 Oct. 7, 2023, attacks has minimized Israeli suffering and Hamas\u2019 role in the conflict.<\/p>\n
Pinker examined 1,559 Times articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024. He found what he described as a dominant narrative in which Israel was assigned \u201cnear-exclusive agency and responsibility\u201d after the Hamas attack. Meanwhile, Israeli casualties after Oct. 7, Hamas fighter casualties and Palestinian violence received much less attention, he asserted. Personal accounts of Palestinian suffering, he assessed, appeared far more frequently than comparable accounts of Israeli trauma.<\/p>\n
Pinker told me that he understands the enormous disparity in the number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the war. But that, he argues, does not absolve the newspaper for a framing of the war that focuses on Palestinian suffering and downplays Israeli motivations for carrying on the fight.<\/p>\n
The Times has rejected Pinker\u2019s conclusions. In response to the study, a spokesperson said the newspaper had covered the war \u201cwith more rigor than virtually any other U.S. news organization\u201d and that editors make \u201ccareful and deliberate choices\u201d about language, framing, prominence and tone in pursuit of independent journalism.<\/p>\n
The discourse around Pinker\u2019s study and the lawsuit reflects the American Jewish community\u2019s longtime obsession with the Times\u2019 Israel coverage, as well as splits within American Jewry itself. A cottage industry of media watchdog groups, including CAMERA and HonestReporting, seeks to expose errors in Israel coverage by the Times and other outlets. They focus on stories or headlines that show Israel in a bad light \u2014 press criticism mixed with pro-Israel advocacy. <\/p>\n
Left-leaning academics and journalists often accuse the critics of having their own biases and dismiss their methodology, suggesting they seek to hold Israel above scrutiny and fail to understand the role of an independent press. <\/p>\n
Eric Alterman, an author and historian who has written extensively about the American media, wrote in his 2022 history of American Jews and Israel, \u201cWe Are Not One,\u201d that if anything, the Times has taken a \u201cconsistent, if sometimes, subtle, pro-Israel slant.\u201d <\/p>\n
He cited frequent protests by pro-Palestinian media critics, who think the Times is biased toward Israel, as well as a series of Jewish editors and Jerusalem bureau chiefs who, while often critical of Israel, used terminology and framing that reflect Israel\u2019s perspective. (The word \u201cnakba,\u201d the Palestinian term for Israel\u2019s creation meaning \u201ccatastrophe,\u201d did not appear in the paper until 1998.)<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nA protester holds a sign outside The New York Times offices, after the newspaper published a cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that many readers said was antisemitic, April 29, 2019. (Erik McGregor\/LightRocket via Getty Images)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But Alterman makes a larger point that is about the audience as much as the newspaper. He believes many American Jews have grown up on the \u201cmyth\u201d of Israeli infallibility and see criticism or bad news about Israel as inherently suspect and evidence of hostility toward Israel or Jews.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople who grow up on this myth and who define their Jewish identities by their fealty to this myth \u2026 find it very painful, very hard to deal with negative coverage of Israel,\u201d Alterman, a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College, said in an interview. \u201cAnd so, as I report in my book, attacking the media for its coverage of Israel became a manifestation of many a Jewish identity.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the petitioners in the recent lawsuit \u2014 the National Center for Public Policy Research think tank and the State Board of Administration of Florida, who as Times shareholders say they are entitled to inspect company books and records \u2014 the question isn\u2019t the Jewish identity of the critics, but what they see as the Times\u2019 board\u2019s failure to enforce the newspaper\u2019s own journalistic standards.<\/p>\n
The suit includes numerous examples. They point to the Times\u2019 initial coverage of the October 2023 explosion at Gaza\u2019s Al-Ahli Hospital, which attributed the blast to an Israeli airstrike before the paper acknowledged that it had relied too heavily on claims by Hamas. The suit also cites an October 2023 account of a Hamas attack on the Israeli city of Ofakim in which, according to the plaintiffs, editors twice changed references to the attackers from \u201cterrorists\u201d to \u201cmen,\u201d which they say reflected a reluctance to use language that cast Hamas negatively.<\/p>\n
And in one of the highest-profile accusations of media bias during the war, the plaintiffs point to a July 2025 story about a severely malnourished Palestinian boy. While the paper said the subject was \u201cborn a healthy child,\u201d the suit argues that Times staff had access before publication to information indicating that the boy had a pre-existing medical condition. (The Times later issued a correction.)<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the absence of any Board-level oversight,\u201d according to the filing, \u201cjournalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the center of this debate is not only what may be the most important single news source in the world, but one with complicated Jewish roots. Adolph Ochs, a Jewish newspaper publisher from Tennessee who was born to German immigrants, bought the struggling paper in 1896. His descendants have controlled it ever since. Och\u2019s father-in-law was Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a founder of Reform Judaism in America, and for decades the newspaper\u2019s editorial line reflected Reform\u2019s vocal anti-Zionism.<\/p>\n
Ochs\u2019 son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, would become the paper\u2019s publisher from 1935 to 1961. Any discussion of the Times\u2019 relationship with the Jewish community is haunted by the paper\u2019s failure, under Sulzberger\u2019s watch, to rigorously cover the Holocaust as it happened. <\/p>\n
When the paper did publish reports on the annihilation of the Jews, former Executive Editor Max Frankel wrote in an extraordinary, overdue mea culpa on the Times\u2019 150th anniversary, \u201cthey were mostly buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured, analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible.\u201d <\/p>\n
While Alterman describes Sulzberger as \u201can antisemite in his hiring practices and an anti-Zionist in his politics,\u201d Laurel Leff, who wrote about the Times\u2019 Holocaust history in her 2005 book \u201cBuried by the Times,\u201d is slightly more measured. <\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nA June 20, 1899 New York Times article reported on the annual conference of the Federation of American Zionists held in Baltimore, Maryland. The newspaper\u2019s owners at the time shared the anti-Zionist sentiments of many Reform Jewish leaders. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
While the Times reported extensively on Nazi persecution and mass murder, it often failed to make clear that Jews were the principal targets of the Nazi genocide. Leff, professor emeritus of journalism at Northeastern University, believes Sulzberger was worried about accusations that the Times would engage in special pleading on behalf of the Jews. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a particular sensitivity about the Jewish issue because of his background,\u201d Leff said in an interview. \u201cBecause he so much wanted the Times to not be viewed as a Jewish newspaper, and his editors and reporters knew that.\u201d<\/p>\n
That sensitivity didn\u2019t only manifest in what stories were and weren\u2019t put on the front page. When Abraham Rosenthal joined the paper as a cub reporter in 1941, his bosses assigned him the byline \u201cA.M. Rosenthal\u201d because the paper\u2019s management felt his first name sounded too Jewish. <\/p>\n
Still, whether chastened by the extent of the Holocaust or just swept up by the prevailing narrative of the day, the Times for many years treated the new state of Israel \u201cas a struggling nation trying to thrive while surrounded by implacably hostile Arab Neighbors,\u201d as former Times reporter Neil A. Lewis wrote in a 2012 paper for the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, over various points beginning in the late 1960\u2019s through the next dozen years, the narrative began to change to a second, more equivocal phase,\u201d Lewis continues. \u201cThe template of the small nation as a David battling a Goliath composed of its enemies no longer fit after Israel prevailed handily in the 1967 War. And gradually, the situation of the Palestinian refugees began to emerge.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Rosenthal rose to executive editor in 1977, the first of five Jews to hold the post over the next four decades, he aligned the paper more closely with the majority of its Jewish readers: still secular, although more open to Jewish stories and Jewish hires. Rosenthal himself, after his mandatory retirement in 1986, transitioned to the opinion pages and wrote pugnacious columns defending Israel\u2019s right-wing Likud Party leaders. <\/p>\n
\u201cRosenthal had done more than any one individual to reconcile the Times to its Jewish identity,\u201d Times alum Samuel Freedman wrote in an appreciation when Rosenthal died in 2006. Among other things, Rosenthal ended an \u201cunspoken\u201d policy blocking Jews from reporting on Israel.<\/p>\n
Not that that shielded the Times from criticism: Thomas L. Friedman, who served as Jerusalem bureau chief from 1984 to 1988, would earn three Pulitzer Prizes for his Mideast coverage but still remained (and remains) a lightning rod for criticism of the paper\u2019s coverage of Israel. (In 1989, a panel discussion featuring Friedman at the 92nd Street Y was interrupted by pro-Israel hecklers who scuffled with security guards. \u201cI spent five years in Beirut. Who thought I\u2019d meet my end at the 92nd Street Y?\u201d Friedman, now a columnist, said from the stage.) <\/p>\n
Coverage of the controversial first Lebanon War, by Friedman and others, kickstarted efforts by pro-Israel groups to monitor and criticize the media\u2019s coverage of the region. CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, was founded in 1982 by Winifred Meyer in response to what she and other founders perceived as highly distorted, anti-Israel reporting on Israel\u2019s military incursion. In his 1989 book, \u201cFrom Beirut to Jerusalem,\u201d Friedman himself criticized the foreign press corps in Lebanon for treating the Palestine Liberation Organization more charitably than it did Israel, the United States or their Lebanese allies.<\/p>\n