There are few things in this world I enjoy more than a cup of coffee and the New York Times. I am an unabashed admirer of its reporting, but of late, a frequent defender, if not even apologist. It is a role I do not relish—like defending your best friend’s bad behavior at a wedding. Despite profound concerns about The Times’ coverage of Israel, I genuinely believe its reporting and opinion pages are unequalled. You can disagree with their Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialists—Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and Nicholas Kristof—but you do so at your own peril because they are masters of political complexity. My respect for The Times is built on decades of devouring it cover to cover, savoring its methodical approach, and believing, perhaps naively, in its good intentions. Of course there have been notable instances of misreporting, ill-informed snap judgments, outright bias, and opinion pieces that are partisan hack jobs. But these are outliers—relatively infrequent and rarely targeted towards one specific set of events.
Until October 7th.
I am not an expert in journalism, but I am an expert in reading The Times having spent over thirty years worshipping at its journalistic altar and having religiously read its coverage of the war in Gaza and the campus protests. And because of this near religious devotion, I am regularly confronted by friends, loved ones, and lifelong subscribers asking me to defend its coverage of Hamas or the pro-Palestinian protests or the recent Pogroms in Amsterdam. My own criticisms of The Times lack the moral clarity of the refrain I hear most—the Times is deliberately antisemitic—but I believe my critique is a more accurate diagnosis of the problem, and that it is necessary to identify the particular strain of antisemitism that infects The Times so we can fashion a proper remedy.
Before I get to my own view of The Times’ coverage, it is important to lay out some of the common criticisms I hear. These criticisms are mostly convincing, but I believe they obscure the true nature of the bias. More broadly, the criticisms I hear most tend to oversimplify the kinds of institutional biases that permeate progressive institutions like The Times, but also Ivy League universities, the Democratic Progressive Caucus, liberal thinktanks, and similarly situated institutions on the far left. I say all this as a proud member of the far left, but one who strongly believes that supporting Israel’s right to exist is in fact a progressive cause.
The criticisms I most frequently hear are:
- The Times refuses to refer to Hamas members as terrorists even though the United States and its allies have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization.
- The Times minimizes the fact that Israeli civilians were the primary targets of Hamas on October 7th and that the IDF does not purposefully target Palestinian civilians.
- The Times consistently reports on the number of casualties in Gaza without distinguishing between militants and civilians.
- The Times treats information from the Israeli government on par with information from Hamas. (Imagine The Times treating information from the United States government as the same as information from Al Qaeda after September 11th.)
- The Times fails to emphasize that Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields and uses hospitals and other civilian infrastructure for military purposes in contravention of international law.
- The Times rarely reports on Hamas or Hezbollah missiles targeting Israeli civilian populations or the fact that approximately 100,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes.
Each of these criticisms is compelling, though occasionally overstated. For example, the term “terrorist” is a loaded normative term, one that inextricably links political judgments and empirical claims. Governments are seldom deemed terrorists, and liberal democracies, Israel included, rarely distinguish between indiscriminate attacks against civilian populations (which clearly meet the definition of terrorism) and targeted attacks against military bases (which do not). But I would leave this debate for another day to focus on the task at hand: outlining the characteristics of The Times’ bias, and by extension, the bias of many progressive institutions.
There are three overlapping features to The Times’ institutional bias. First, The Times gives Israel far too much journalistic attention. There are too many reporters covering it, too many headlines about it, too many pages devoted to it, and too many editorials on what needs to be done. The obsession with Israel could be explained away in marketing terms (Israel equals eyeballs), geopolitical terms (it is the most important region in the world), religious ones (it is the birthplace of the Abrahamic religions) or more nefarious ones (hatred of Jews). Regardless of the mix of causes, the result is that Israel receives more scrutiny than any foreign country, and this heightened scrutiny, often uncorrelated to actual newsworthiness, invariably leads to bias because Israel is under a journalistic microscope.
Second, there is a dominant political narrative—the powerful colonizer state versus the powerless indigenous people—that overinforms The Times’ coverage. As we have seen on college campuses, this progressive narrative is a powerful one, but one that should be severely limited in a place with the journalistic integrity of The Times. There might be circumstances in which one could use this oppressor versus oppressed paradigm for illumination, but Lebanon is surely not one of them. The minute Israel started its war in Lebanon, The Times swapped out “Gaza”and replaced it with “Lebanon” even though these conflicts are entirely different. The reason for this, I would argue, is that the narrative of a powerful Israeli military bombing a civilian population is prioritized over facts like: Hezbollah is a heavily-equipped military force, Lebanon is a multicultural society that Hezbollah has hijacked, and Israel has not blockaded or occupied Lebanon. A far more compelling narrative centers on the role Iran, a Persian powerbroker without any legitimate role in Arab nations like Palestine or Lebanon, plays in the Middle East. Iran has a stated mission of wiping Israel off the face of the earth. Its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, share this mission. Their charters are explicit about killing Jews and destroying Israel. This is a far more instructive narrative, but The Times’ reporting on the war in Lebanon demonstrates that it values a narrative more closely aligned with the BDS movement than actual geopolitical realities.
Third, the Times applies double standards to Israel and treats it differently than any other nation. This is a form of bias recognized by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which lists eleven examples of contemporary antisemitism. One of the most compelling, yet controversial of these examples, states: “Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The Times meets this IHRA definition daily. A clear example is its treatment of how the IDF operates in Gaza and Lebanon. Like other advanced militaries, the IDF causes innumerable civilian casualties, many which could and should be avoided, and its members commit crimes. This is not something Israel fails to recognize, and by the standards of other advanced militaries, there are strong arguments to be made about the reasonableness of the IDF’s conduct. The Times, like most progressive institutions, repeatedly treats the Israeli military as if it should be held to a higher standard than, for example, the United States military. Rather than relying on military experts to inform The Times about the reasonableness of Israel’s attempts to protect civilian populations, The Times simply reports on the causalities without context. By contrast, in America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, The Times underreported the number of casualties and did not hold the United States military to the same standards as the IDF. This double standard lies at the core of The Times’ bias.
Perhaps my biggest problem with The New York Times is that I expect so much from it. I want it to be a progressive institution that recognizes that Israel is a liberal democracy filled with contradictions and political complexities like most Western nations. I guess I don’t understand why The Times reflexively falls back on a simplistic narrative of the world, especially given the in-depth nature of its reporting on Israel. In the end, I’m not here to tell you to cancel your New York Times subscription. I’ve decided to keep mine. But I worry I won’t be able to defend it much longer.
Jay Schiffman
Founder & Executive Director