New York Times Faces Lawsuit Over Bias in Israel Coverage

The New York Times faces a shareholder lawsuit accusing the paper of ignoring a whistleblower’s complaints of anti-Israel bias and false reporting.The suit, filed by Florida’s state-run public pension fund and a conservative think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, accuses the paper of “repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions,” including many that are later disproven or admitted to be wrong. The suit is asking a New York judge to force the company’s board of directors to hand over internal records related to compliance with its own published editorial standards.The suit, filed Wednesday, alleges the company’s board has failed in its obligation to monitor the company’s internal controls and has allowed journalistic standards to be weaponized to “serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.” The plaintiffs say they want access to the documents to answer whether the company’s board of directors exercises any meaningful oversight of the company’s compliance with its own published editorial standards, source-verification protocols, and corrections controls.The National Center first demanded access to the Times’ corporate records after an opinion writer at the paper, Nicholas Kristof, published a column in May with the inflammatory allegation that Israeli officials trained dogs to rape Palestinians, a claim that reporters at the paper doubted would have survived the newsroom’s fact-checking standards. The rape claim was attributed to an anonymous “Gaza journalist.”Mr. Kristof interviewed several Palestinians who alleged that they were abused by Israeli security officials. Critics questioned the credibility of interviewees, noting that some of them had documented histories of glorifying terrorists or records of extreme anti-Israel bias. The state of Israel has threatened to sue the Times for defamation. Prime Minister Netanyahu called Mr. Kristof’s piece a “blood libel.”The concerns raised in the lawsuit go beyond a single article. The suit claims evidence of repeated errors and corrections and internal complaints about editorial standards. The suit noted that a peer-reviewed study counted 72 instances of the paper admitting errors in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.The suit relies on evidence collected by a former Times employee who repeatedly raised her concerns inside the company about anti-Israel bias. The whistleblower, who was not named in the lawsuit, said she was rebuffed when she told the human resources department about the bias. “If you don’t like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours,” the suit claims she was told.The employee, who spent a decade on the paper’s video desk, reported at least 15 separate reporting standards violations beginning in 2019 but said people in the company’s standards reporting system “turned on her rather than address what she reported.”“The public deserve a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved,” the whistleblower told the Free Press, which was first to receive a copy of the lawsuit.“The Times allowed Kristof to publish extraordinary allegations without demonstrating that its own fact-checking standards were followed,” the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project’s executive director, Steve Milloy, said in a statement. “When a newspaper’s credibility is one of its most valuable assets, shareholders have a right to know whether the company has meaningful systems in place to protect it,” Mr. Milloy added.The National Jewish Advocacy Center is helping represent the plaintiffs. The organization says the purpose of the lawsuit is to vindicate the rights of shareholders to exercise their legal right to examine books and records in response to legitimate concerns regarding the stewardship of their investments. “The Gaza rape story follows a substantial list of previous failures in accuracy and oversight in reporting,” the group’s associate director and senior counsel, Ben Schlager, told The New York Sun.Mr. Schlager says issues at the Times have been decades in the making and even led to the Times having to return a Peabody Award and withdraw one of its prominent series from Pulitzer consideration. “The egregiousness of the New York Times’s reporting is directly tied to the egregiousness of its removal of relevant safeguards and failure to establish alternative appropriate board-level monitoring and oversight,” Mr. Schlager said. “The resulting cascade of Times’s reporting transgressions are, in a sense, ancillary to the premeditated lack of oversight that made those transgressions possible.”The suit does not ask the court to review the paper’s editorial judgement but says reasonable steps must be taken to learn whether the controls the company maintains against a perception of unreliable or biased reporting could damage the paper and ultimately shareholders. The Florida pension fund, with 1.2 million members and beneficiaries, owns about one percent of the newspaper’s Class A voting shares.“When you are a publicly traded company, and the New York Times is, you have legal responsibilities and duties to your shareholders and we saw some very dangerous trends,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said Wednesday at a news conference. Mr. Uthmeier said the Florida board of administration requested an inspection demand on August 10, but was rebuffed. After narrowing the request to board-level governance records from 2020 forward, the parties held a “meet and confer” on September 1. “Company counsel stated that the Company would produce nothing. Each request is framed so that the absence of responsive documents is itself an answer. If no Board reporting channel exists, the Company can say so,” Mr. Uthmeier said.“The question is not whether The New York Times has the right to publish controversial journalism,” Mr. Milloy said. “Of course it does. The question is whether the company is actually following the safeguards it tells its readers and investors are essential to producing accurate and trustworthy journalism.”The New York Times says the lawsuit has no merit and was brought for “an improper purpose.” “Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias, and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment,” the New York Times executive director of media relations and communications, Charlie Stadtlander, said in a statement emailed to the Sun. “We will defend against the suit vigorously.”

New York Times Faces Lawsuit Over Bias in Israel Coverage

New York Times Faces Lawsuit Over Bias in Israel Coverage

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