Is Journalistic Bias Unconstitutional?

A lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Times seeks what Reuters calls “materials to determine whether the company’s board is letting the newspaper promote biased editorial coverage against Israel.” This brainstorm comes from a state-run pension fund in Florida and a conservative think tank. Their filing in a New York court reckons that, per Reuters, a “series of factual errors” supports a “reasonable inference” that it has “weaponized” its standards.“When you’re a news agency, your credibility is everything,” says Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, who filed the suit, at a press conference Wednesday. The Times, he added, “tells its own investors that its brand and reputation are its most important assets.” Yet the lawsuit avers that the subpar journalistic practices prevailing today at the Times are designed “to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.”To that point, Florida’s lawsuit is seeking evidence to illuminate what it calls “a narrow question of corporate governance.” That, per the lawsuit, is “whether the Board exercises any meaningful oversight of the Company’s compliance with its own published editorial standards, source-verification protocols, corrections controls, and other internal controls on which the Company’s self-described principal asset depends.”A spokesman for the Times responds that the suit, filed in state supreme court at Manhattan, “has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose.” He added that while the suit “is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records,” the legal effort is meant “to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment.”The Sun is on the Times’ side of the Constitution here. We’ve long shared concerns about the Gray Lady’s anti-Israel bias. The other day the paper fixed a story about the film “NAZA,” which deals with the war in Gaza. “Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of October 7,” the story groused. The Times removed the line, lamenting that it had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”That the text in question had made it into print helps illustrate the grievance spotlighted by Florida’s lawsuit. At the same time, the suit’s focus on the governance of the paper suggests, too, the close relationship between the First Amendment’s protections of press freedom and the Constitution’s larger defense of private property rights. This is a point that surfaced in John Reed’s famous account of the Bolshevik revolution, “Ten Days That Shook the World.”On the first day of the revolt, the noble comrades suspended press freedom, supposedly temporarily. On the tenth day, though, some hapless Bolshevik suggested it was time to restore freedom of the press. This was met by Lenin with a tirade against restoring to capitalist owners their presses, type, paper, and ink. That, Lenin lectured, was now property of the revolution. Which is how press freedom was lost in Soviet Russia — for want of property rights. The Times can take legal shelter under both property rights and the First Amendment. The Times’ ownership structure, too, in which the Sulzberger family controls the voting stock, could bolster their defense against a suit like Florida’s. Even so, the lawsuit warns that the company’s “value rests on a core asset, The New York Times newspaper,” whose worth “depends on consumers’ confidence that the company’s reporting is factually reliable and trustworthy.”

Is Journalistic Bias Unconstitutional?

Is Journalistic Bias Unconstitutional?

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