There have been a ton of articles criticizing Nicholas Kristof’s poorly sourced and dubious NYT column accusing Israel of widespread sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners (yes, with dogs, too)—most of the critiques noting that Kristof’s sources were unnamed, undocumented, and those that were named had histories of being pro-Hamas. You can easily find these critiques on social media, but Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer and senior fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute, levels a different accusation: not so much at Kristof but at the New York Times itself.
He notes something I overlooked: the paper used to have a “public editor” whose job was to call attention to errors and misreporting in the paper, but the NYT ditched that position nine years ago. Now there is no public editor: their job has been sourced to—get this—social media and readers. The rationale is that social media itself, combined with reader reaction, will correct errors. But that’s completely bogus. Yes, readers and social media may point out errors, as they have in this case, but thety also can reinforce them. As you know, social media is a dumpster fire and there’s no guarantee that a clash of ideas and assertions will surely out the truth.
Beyond that, it is the responsibility of the paper itself to correct errors, apologizing for them and admitting guilt. The NYT won’t do that, for it’s pushed back on the criticism of Kristof’s delusions, defending them by asserting—get this again—that he won two Pulitzer Prizes. With two nods like that, how can he be wrong? Here’s all the NYT has said:
— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) May 13, 2026
In larger print; you can judge for yourself how extensive the “fact-checking” was, given that there was no public editor to describe it:
The deep-sixing of a public editor is almost an admission that a paper has no interest in correcting itself. You can see from the Times‘s doubling down in this latest case that the NYT is standing behind assertions of systemic sexual torture in the Israeli government, as well as in using trained dogs to rape prisoners. The fact that Kristof’s factual claims were made in an op-ed does not excuse the paper.
Click below to read:
Some quotes:
In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.
In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.
This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.
That is the story I want to tell. Not the column. The column has been dissected by a dozen outlets in 36 hours. The story is what the column reveals about the institution that printed it, and about the decision the institution made nine years ago that produced this moment.
Yesterday I wrote about the sources:
The piece is The New York Times Has a Source Problem. The short version: two of Kristof’s primary sources are a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos, and an NGO whose chairman publicly mourned a senior Hamas commander as “our great commander” earlier this year. The same NGO has officially called Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 a “propaganda tool.” Its board chair endorsed 9/11 inside-job conspiracies.
I asked yesterday how the Times missed any of this when two Google searches would have surfaced all of it.
Today I want to ask why nobody inside the paper is allowed to ask that question on the record.
This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:
“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”
This was what happened when there was a public reporter and Kristof got his tuchas smacked:
Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.
In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.
His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.
This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.
The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now.
There are other examples, but the point is that no such internal mechanism of correction exists. Instead, we get a defense, which Mazzig summarizes:
. . . The defense
This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:
“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”
The fuller statement credits Kristof for traveling to the region and says his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by “independent studies.” It does not name the studies.
Read it twice if you need to. Notice what it does not say. It does not address Euro-Med’s Hamas affiliation. It does not address Sami al-Sai’s October 8 Facebook post celebrating the massacre. It does not address Amro’s shifting account between the Washington Post and the Times. It does not address the absence of corroborating evidence in the column’s most explosive cases. It does not say what the “independent studies” are.
It says Kristof has Pulitzers and the Times stands behind him.
In 2014, the same paper produced a Public Editor’s column titled “When Mr. Kristof’s Sources Are Questioned” and an internal reckoning. In 2026, the same paper produces a press release.
Deborah Lipstadt, until recently the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, asked the Times publicly whether it had any sense of decency. Lipstadt is the world’s leading historian of Holocaust denial. She knows what a blood libel looks like. When she names one out loud, the line has been crossed.
Mazzig hastens to add that he’s not saying Kristof is an antisemite or the NYT decided to hurt Jews. Nor is he claiming that Israel has never mistreated a prisoner, nor attacked one with dogs (I’d ask for evidence for both such claims, though). What he’s saying is this:
I am arguing something more dangerous because it is more boring. The editorial standards of the world’s most important paper have drifted, and the institution dismantled the internal voice that used to flag the drift. The defense statement issued today is what accountability looks like in a building where Margaret Sullivan no longer exists.
And he winds up going after the paper again:
The Times will probably not retract, but the conversation has started. Longtime contacts of media reporter David Shuster told him this afternoon there are discussions up the masthead. We will see.
What moves the needle is the accumulated record. The Somaly Mam parallel. The shifting Amro and al-Sai accounts. The verification asymmetry between American prisons and Israeli ones. The headline change on the Eurovision piece. The Silenced No More report. Lipstadt’s question. Yesterday’s piece and this one. Every citation builds the file.
That file is what real accountability requires. The Times made that file harder to build in 2017, and we are watching what that decision produced.
We know that the Times staff is full of young progressives—people who helped push out Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil, Jr., and James Bennet. They are sensitive to social media and public opinion, and the combination of progressive staff and social media is toxic.
The paper needs to correct Kristof’s column, for it’s clear he will not do so himself.
Does a Nobel prize-winning scientist get to publish any rubbish in the scientific literature just because he or she won a Nobel prize? Of course not. So, Kristoff’s Pulitzer prizes should have no bearing on anything he writes today. The NYT should fact-check him, not give him a free pass.
Though I concur with your thesis- Kristoff having a Pulitzer means nothing with regard to what he writes today, and that the organ should vet what they print, your statement “Does a Nobel prize-winning scientist get to publish any rubbish in the scientific literature just because he or she won a Nobel prize?” historically gets a qualified yes.
THere are a lot of examples, some quite embarrassing (see Pauling and Watson, for example), but one that comes close to mind is Josephson. For example, his obit in the Guardian and his letter to Nature when Fleischmann passed carry weight due to where published, and the only reason they WERE published is his Nobel. Are these publications in the lit? Arguably, letters in Nature, Science, NEJM, and a variety of other top tier journals are, rightly or wrongly, often treated as such. There are journals with a very bad
This is not, unfortunately, a new issue, neither inside nor outside of the world of science, and over the last decade or so, there seems to be a greater lean in many journals towards a theory of credential+ideology=Run it
I should have made it clear that I was referring to publications that communicate new research data, not letters to scientific journals. In my years reviewing papers for journals, I’ve only been asked to look at the former, so I have assumed that the editors handled the letters alone. I believe I’ve maxed out my responses now, which leaves space for others.
In my years reviewing papers for journals, the vast majority of journals hid the names of the researchers to eliminate bias due to name recognition.
Fair comment, but frequently, you can get a very good idea of who wrote it from the paper itself. Moreover, you always know the author(s) once it has been published.
Your point (and Mazzig’s) is well made. Kristof is only a minor part of the problem. And Israel is only an example of the problem.
The problem is that journalists have long considered themselves opinion makers, rather than reporters. This the role they established for themselves: the power behind the scenes of society. But now, the social media influencers have outstripped them in that tole, by reaching more people, and writing more outrageously.
So the standard outlets like the NYT, which have long ago given up being primary news supporters in favor of popular opinion-making, have no choice but to double down.
One can also wonder if the slant of a story is influenced by which version is anticipated to get the most clicks.
I don’t think it’s the clicks, I think it is that the majority of the NYT staff are pro-Hamas, and see any fabrication supporting their position as justifiable. This is what happens when you employ the Pharyngula commentariat as newspaper staff.
@Starwolf
I agree with the assessment. In Germany, there is a specific term for this for this type of journalism. It is called Haltungsjournalismus. There is no English translation available as far as I recall. Wikipedia describes Haltungsjournalismus as follows:
“The journalist takes a specific stance or perspective on an issue and openly expresses it. This can be achieved through the selection of topics, the style of reporting, the choice of words, and the emphasis placed on certain aspects. Sometimes journalists openly take a political, social, or cultural stance and use their platform to advocate for certain values or beliefs. The focus is on taking a clear position (advocacy journalism) without necessarily expressing a recognizable opinion as in commentary.
In discussions of this topic, the lines are often blurred between opinion journalism—which should be distinguished from this and focuses on the author’s personal opinions and convictions—and partisan journalism, in which a specific, often one-sided political or ideological perspective on events or topics is expressed.”
Playing devil’s advocate, it was an opinion piece! Opinion-making is the whole point of an op ed, so expressing opinions and attempting to persuade others of your opinion is not necessarily a problem.
However, that changes completely when a respected journalist with enormous reach uses obviously unreliable, highly motivated, and heavily biased sources to make bogus and inflammatory claims about a deeply emotive issue. The likely and entirely foreseeable consequences will be to stoke division, accelerate the relentless increase in anti-semitism and encourage violence. They’ll also be felt worldwide.
I don’t know if this is just sloppy journalism or a deliberate effort to mislead readers, but either would amount to irresponsible and unethical conduct. When the situation is as emotionally charged and inflamed as this one, such behaviours become reckless and dangerous.
For a Pulitzer Prize winner to behave like this is outrageous and disgraceful.
I don’t think that the NYT has any interest in publishing the truth, full stop. To the extent that the NYT was ever a reliable source of news, that shipped sailed off long ago. They are an activist outfit, but also need to turn a profit. So expect pandering to a certain ideological demo in order to drive views (and generate outrage, which also drives views!). Their journalism can only be trusted when the actual facts align with their progressive ideology and profit motives.
Somebody should put together a handy chart showing this alignment so that we know which articles are worth reading and which can be skipped over entirely. We already know that on the issue of Israel and Palestine, the NYT ‘s coverage is close to worthless.
As I said yesterday, one can debate Kristof’s veracity (thankfully, many are doing so), but there’s a meta-matter underling the controversy that says even more about the Times than does Kristof’s screed—and that is the fact that the Times timed the piece to coincide with publication of the Civil Commission’s 298 page report on sexual violence by Hamas.* From this timing, one might reasonably infer that the New York Times published the piece in an effort to erase the October 7 atrocities.
Now that most of the eyewitnesses are gone, and it has become practicable to deny the Holocaust, the New York Times seems to be leading the charge to erase the record of the worst single attack against the Jewish people in 80 years. Kristof’s opinion piece teaches me far more about how the New York Times operates than it does about anything else.
*
https://www.civilc.org/silenced-no-more.
Agree timing is not a coincidence. It doesn’t require a conspiracy mind-set to assume reprehensible intent.
I don’t know Norm and Emily (great picture btw!)… I don’t think they’re that organized, and further: they publish so MUCH anti-Israeli stuff all the time that their latest Jew/Israel burn coincidence is bound to occur even randomly.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Depressingly, I have seen many a comment on the old socials suggesting that the timing of the Israeli report was itself propaganda meant to distract from the Kristof piece…
As with most things regarding this conflict, too many people’s views are completely arse backwards to the likely reality.
This is ignorant, laughable and truly pathetic.
Allow me to quote from a book review by US historian Jeffrey Herf:
Jeffrey Herf: Islamist Terror; Journalistic Error. Quillette, Dec 2, 2022
In a valuable new book, historian Richard Landes argues that Western reporting on the Second Palestinian Intifada helped to seed a misunderstanding of terrorism.
https://archive.ph/kGqSE
A review of Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad by Richard Landes, 523 pages, Academic Studies Press, 2022
In Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?, Richard Landes, a historian of apocalyptic movements in medieval Europe, re-examines the reporting of Palestinian attacks on Israel, starting with the Second Intifada that began in September 2000. Principally, he looks at the ways in which postcolonial ideology and the intimidation of journalists have been used to obscure the links between Islamist ideology and terrorist practice, and how this process disfigures public discourse and understanding.
Many of Landes’s points and arguments will be familiar to those who have followed this topic over the years—his criticisms of anti-Zionists like Edward Said, Judith Butler, and Tony Judt; his disapproval of Western feminists’ reluctance to denounce Islamist misogyny and antisemitism; and his impatience with progressive Jewish academics reluctant to address the Islamist ideological sources of the terrorist campaigns against Israel.
this is a compelling critique of the various journalists and public figures—especially in France, Britain, and the United States—who managed to be consistently wrong about the facts and their causes. Their errors were not random, however. Landes argues that they resulted from a combination of political biases and threats issued by Palestinian organizations. The failure of journalists, in particular, to grasp the ideological causes of the attacks on the Jewish state in 2000 helped to prevent a coherent understanding of the Islamist attacks on the United States and Europe that followed.
Landes writes that, as a result, much Western reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict came to follow a four-fold approach.
First, it reframed the conflict as one of an Israeli Goliath vs a Palestinian David rather than a tiny liberal democracy surrounded by theocratic and autocratic enemies.
Second, it reported Palestinian claims as reliable until proven otherwise “while treating Israeli counterclaims as dubious, if not false, until proven true.”
Third, it reported “as little as possible about the religious culture of genocide and terrorism that flourishes in Palestinian-controlled areas.”
And fourth, it corrected “errors that result from this approach as slowly and inconspicuously as possible.”
“First, it reframed the conflict as one of an Israeli Goliath vs a Palestinian David rather than a tiny liberal democracy surrounded by theocratic and autocratic enemies.”
Yeah, this always gets lost in the shuffle. Great example of how easy it is to take advantage of the profound ignorance of many in the West about the basics of geography and demographics.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/muslim-majority-countries
The goal seems to be to normalize the Islamist belief that the entire world should be controlled by Muslims. When convenient, some historical precedence (as in “we were here first”) will be used. Failing that, the land will just be taken over. See most of North Africa and Pakistan for instance.
I wonder how many specific examples of Palestinians fabrications of accusations to defame Israel Kristof. There are dozens of such dating from the beginning of this war, and many more over the years. Could Kristof really be that ignorant? If so, he has no business writing about this conflict. If his ignorance is deliberate, or false (which I personally believe is more likely) then he has become a full fledged anti-Semite.
That’s what I took it to mean when they fired Weiss.
Here’s a brief piece on Israel’s response to Kristof/NYT’s most recent blood libel:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/427080
On the very same day as the Kristoff Ope Ed The Times also printed a front page ‘investigation; about Israel’s Eurovision campaign. Online it had the accusatory title “How Israel ‘Co-opted’ Eurovision — and Nearly Broke the World’s Biggest Song Contest” that was later changed to “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool” since apparently Israel didn’t break any rules in investing in the promotion of their song– as pretty much every other country does the same. Perhaps Israel does this to counteract the fact that several countries, including Spain and Ireland–refused even to broadcast the Israeli song? These two diversionary stories about Israel and meanwhile, nothing in the print edition on the Silenced No More report.
The Times of Israel (ToI) has a good video daily briefing today with their editor on the Kristoff article and how the ToI handles covering “blood libels”. The conversation starts at around 16:00 and runs to the end at 31:00. Url is
https://www.timesofisrael.com/daily-briefing-may-14-what-are-tois-guiding-principles-in-covering-blood-libels/
Googke:
“What is the meaning of the dogs of war?
“…. It’s meant to represent a vivid and powerful image and compares the unleashed chaos and devastation of actual war to that of a pack of wild, uncontrollable dogs.”
Describes hamas behaviour perfectly on the 7th Oct. and now the dogs breakfast perpetuated by Kristof & the NY Times.
Truth? buried like a bone.
Is Nicholas Kristof related to Claas Relotius? It seems that way to me, since they both love telling fairy tales and making up stories.
Unsurprising that WEIT and the smaller, (two of which are real amateur hour, rinky dink) websites that publish my own column care more about truth and accuracy than the “great” NY Times.
I have only vibes but I thought I felt a phase change in the Times about ten years ago in many domains. Happily I no longer subscribe. Like I don’t send money to Hamas.
D.A.
NYC 🗽
In the prison of Sde Teimann CCTV leaks showed 5 guards hide their faces with riot shields and rape a detainee, puncturing his rectum and puncturing his lungs. All five of those guards had all of their charges dropped with several gov officials, including Netanyahu, celebrating that decision.
To me, this is indicative of the depravity of the IDF. The SA crimes of Israel are well documented, even before the genocide. If you don’t believe me you can look up 100% of thai workers in Israel.
This case is well known (see here: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/end-of-the-sde-teiman-abuse-case–the-idf-mag-withdraws-indictments). As everybody says, such incidents happen occasionally in wartime, but you use them to show the “depravity of the IDF”. This already shows that you are tarring the entire military for the accused actions of a few.
There have been war crimes committed by Israeli forces. Hoewer, there is no “genocide”. None of the allegations in this regard have been proven to date, even though pro-Palestinian activists, UN commissions, countries such as South Africa, and NGOs such as Amnesty International have gone to great lengths to do so, even attempting to redefine the internationally recognized definition of “genocide.”