Of course newspapers are allowed to have editorial opinions, usually expressed in op-eds written by the editors, but good newspapers are supposed to remain ideologically and politically neutral in their coverage of the news itself. And in America the supposedly best newspaper, the New York Times (NYT), expresses its philosophy in a famous motto: “All the news that’s fit to print,” put on the masthead 119 years ago by the paper’s founders.
Now you can debate whether the paper includes all the news that is good to know about (the motto), or whether it includes trivial news of little interest (the latter is, formally, within the ambit of the motto). But the “paper of record,” as it’s called, should surely at least be objective about the news, not slanting it one way or thee other.
If you’ve followed the paper as this site has done, you’ll see that I don’t believe in the objectivity of the NYT’s news coverage. It is strongly anti-Israel—the subject of this article—and also strongly anti-Trump (see below, and remember I’m talking about the news, not the editorials). While I’m no fan at all of our narcissistic President, I do expect objective coverage in terms of both content and balance. I really do believe in my heart that the NYT hopes that Israel will disappear, and that America will lose our war with Iran.
Gerald Posner, a very formidable figure, has arrived at the same conclusion. If you haven’t heard of Posner, you should have. He’s an investigative journalist who has written 13 books, although the list in Wikipedia comprises 14:
- Mengele: The Complete Story (1986)
- Warlords of Crime: Chinese Secret Societies – The New Mafia (1988)
- Bio-Assassins (1989)
- Hitler’s Children: Sons and Daughters of Leaders of the Third Reich Talk About Their Fathers and Themselves (1991), ISBN 978-0-394-58299-3
- Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), ISBN 978-0-679-41825-2
- Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (1996), Random House, ISBN 978-0-614-05801-7
- Killing the Dream: James Earl Ray and the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998), ISBN 978-0-375-50082-4
- Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11 (2003), ISBN 978-0-375-50879-0
- Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power (Music of the Great Lakes) (2003), Random House, ISBN 978-0-375-50062-6
- Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-U.S. Connection (2005), ISBN 978-1-4000-6291-1
- Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power – A Dispatch From the Beach (2009), ISBN 978-1-4165-7656-3
- The Third Man: Was there another bomber in Oklahoma City?(2013),ISBN 978-0-9891-4210-6
- God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican (2015), Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4165-7657-0
- Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (2020), Simon and Schuster, ISBN 978-1-5011-5189-7
I’ve read the last one, Pharma, and found it a very good and thoroughly documented indictment of Big Pharma (don’t mistake it for Empire of Pain, the story of the Sackler family). At any rate, as Posner himself notes in the tweet below, he’s also written 11 op-eds for the NYT. And lately he’s been disappointed in the paper.
Posner is half Jewish and half Catholic; but, as Grok says, with some links, “Gerald Posner is not a practicing Jew and does not consider himself Jewish. He has said so directly and repeatedly.” That’s relevant because of his indictment of the NYT below.
First, the tweet, which Posner made last Friday:
You can read Posner’s piece at his Substack for free; just click here. The gist of it is in the tweet above, but I’ll quote a bit:
This week gave us a small, almost clinical example of a much larger problem.
Correspondent Isabel Kershner was reporting on NAZA, the wildly controversial Israeli film about IDF conduct in Gaza that received a 25-minute standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the original version of her story, Kershner wrote that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”
Not that they were victims. Instead, that they “view themselves” that way—as though there were another serious way to describe the people murdered, raped, wounded and kidnapped in the Hamas-led assault. Would the Times ever write that Americans “still largely view themselves as the victims” of 9/11?
After a furious online backlash, the Times removed the sentence and attached an Editors’ Note. It blamed “an editing error,” saying the language had been intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response but had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”
I have written corrections in my career. I have had editors save me from my own inaccurate or clumsy phrasing. What I know from decades of reporting is that a sentence casting doubt on whether the roughly 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 taken hostage on October 7 count as victims does not just materialize on the page. A reporter wrote it. Editors read it but it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made enough noise.
That is how a worldview leaks through an editing process.
Now people have lauded the NYT for making that “correction,” but in truth the paper was probably lying: the original wording was not an “editing error”, for the meaning of the original is quite clear. Nor was the correction explanatory: what does it mean to say the phrase was “intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response”? The military response was clearly based on the government and IDF viewing themselves as victims of a Hamas attack.
Posner goes after Nicholas Kristof’s infamous “dog rape” piece, too, which was based on anonymous sources:
Then there was Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 opinion column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” I have written about its description of serious allegations of sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including the claim that dogs had been trained to rape Palestinian prisoners. That extraordinary claim was built largely on anecdotal, Hamas-adjacent sourcing that no other serious outlet had independently corroborated or agreed to publish.
The Times’s Opinion editors said the column had been fact-checked and that they found no errors. Executive editor Joe Kahn later said the news department “wouldn’t have done that exact piece,” while also expressing confidence that his Opinion colleagues had done their due diligence, a process he wasn’t part of. Kahn did not repudiate Kristof’s column but his distinction still exposed something readers are entitled to find troubling. A piece the news side would not have done appeared beneath the same New York Times banner, fortified by the same institutional authority.
Inside the building, News and Opinion may be separate countries. To the public, they share a flag. The paper had given its imprimatur to that flawed claim.
Well, I would cut the paper a little slack here, but it’s telling that an op-ed was really a news piece, and a news piece that would not have run as regular news. For one thing, the sources were anonymous. I have looked for verification of Kristof’s claims and haven’t found any, but Israel is probably still investigating them, which were made in May.
What is telling to me are the statistics—the number of articles, which is what eventually convinced me that the NYT is biased (see also the headlines below):
The case is no longer merely anecdotal. It now has data behind it and the data needs to be described with some care.
Edieal Pinker, a professor of operations research at the Yale School of Management, analyzed 1,559 Times news articles published from October 7, 2023, through June 7, 2024. His paper was peer-reviewed and published in *Studies in Conflict & Terrorism*—an academic journal, not an advocacy website.
Pinker found that 1,423 of the 1,559 articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after October 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the ensuing war. “Israel” appeared 27,205 times, compared with 8,499 mentions of “Hamas.” Personal accounts of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appeared, on average, two out of every three days, while there were nine stretches of at least a week with no mention of Israeli casualties after October 7. During one period, six Hezbollah rocket or anti-tank attacks that wounded Israeli civilians went unmentioned across 25 Times articles about fighting on the northern border.
Those are not merely impressions but countable editorial outcomes.
Pinker himself does not claim that his study proves bias or intent but rather that it documents imbalances that give readers an incomplete picture of the war.
Since the war was between Israel and Hamas, one would expect roughly equal coverage rather than a threefold difference in mentions of Israel versus Hamas. And the lack of mention of Israeli casualties inflicted by Hezbollah is also telling. The view one gets is that Israeli casualties simply aren’t important compared to those of Palestinians, which of course include Hamas terrorists (something that isn’t often mentioned, as they almost invariably are lumped in with “civilians”).
Posner notes this:
The Times responded to Pinker’s newly published study by accusing advocates of “cherry-picking” data and pointing to its own body of work—more than 23,000 articles, photographs and videos since October 7, 2023. It said its reporting had exposed atrocities by Hamas as well as alleged violations of international law by Israel.
That is a defense of volume and range, not a rebuttal of Pinker’s method or findings. The 23,000 figure also covers a longer period and mixes articles with photos and videos, while Pinker studied 1,559 news articles from a defined eight-month window. The two numbers are not competing samples. Invoking the larger one may sound impressive, but it does not answer what Pinker measured inside the smaller one.
But if this was a scientific assertion, reviewers would reject it because it’s trying to refute statistics by simply citing a large mass of articles in which you can find some indictments of Hamas as well as of Israel. And that is cherry picking. The question is how often is one cited versus another. Posner then clarifies his accusation:
I want to be precise about what I am contending. I am not alleging a conspiracy, and I am not saying every Times reporter on this beat acts in bad faith. Still, the imbalance is documented. Whether one labels it “bias” depends partly on the baseline used and partly on a judgment about intent—something a word count cannot establish. My own judgment comes not from one table or one sentence, but from the way the numbers, editorial choices and recurrent lapses fit together.
Israel-Gaza is the sharpest example right now, but it is not the only one. I have seen on other subjects a similar tendency: reporting that lands consistently on one side of a contested question, then treats challenges to its framing as evidence of bad faith rather than legitimate pushback. Israel is simply the case where the evidence this month is hardest to wave away—and where the human stakes are highest.
Posner ends by citing a damning figure about how the public trust in mass media has plummeted:
My own disillusionment is part of a much larger collapse. In 1972, when Gallup began asking Americans whether they trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 68 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence. In Gallup’s 2025 survey, the figure was 28 percent—the first time it had fallen below 30. The Times did not cause that collapse by itself. But the country’s most influential newspaper cannot pretend to be merely a bystander to it.
I still read the Times. I also read and watch outlets on all sides of the political spectrum, from Al Jazeera to Fox News. I learn from the different ways they cover the same issue. The Times is different because it continues to trade on the authority of an institution that is supposed to do more than validate the worldview of its core audience.
Indeed. Of course the pro-Palestinians will deny his claims, but all I can say is that I was never a defender of Israel until October 7 happened and people started saying that Israel brought the Hamas attacks upon itself—and deserved them. Then I began noticing that the NYT seemed to come down on that side.
And there is the biggest lie—that of Israeli genocide. That lie is easily refuted by looking at the food Israel sent into Gaza (how many armies give sustenance to their opponents?), the polio vaccines sent to Gaza by Israel during the war, and all the warnings that the IDF gave civilians to get out of the way before an imminent attack. For crying out loud, if Israel wanted to wipe out Palestinians as a whole, why didn’t they attack the West Bank after October 7?
If you want to read a scathing indictment of the Big Genocide Lie, read Maarten Boudry’s piece, “They don’t believe it either.”
But I digress. To show more biased coverage, here’s a screenshot of the headlines from the Saturday NYT. This is not at all unusual, and I haven’t edited it:
h/t: Luana
Thank you for bringing this important analysis to our attention. I think many of your readers have noticed the bias at The NY Times for some time and it is good to see it quantified and analyzed by a reputable investigator.
I wonder, however, why it should matter whether he is a practicing Jew or not. When a black person says something is racist it carries MORE weight. And likewise for other ethnicities. On the other hand, I’ve noticed that when a Jew (even a ‘non-practicing Jew’ or has a Jewish ancestor or even if just married to a Jew) says something is biased against the only Jewish country in the world — or against Jews in general – this is dismissed. Except of course, for all those “as a Jews” who use their Jewishness (often not practicing) to attack Israel, in which case their opinions are broadcast everywhere.
Some time ago, there was a post here that rated news sources for left/right bias and for accuracy. The link to the site is here: https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive The NY Times is ranked rather significantly to the left, and fairly far down in accuracy. I don’t know if that specific weighing includes slants in op-eds.
I wonder if the The Grey Lady was ever unbiased and laudably accurate?
Newspapers — and journalism in general — have been biased since the first newspapers in the American colonies were rabidly anti-British. Prof. Coyne’s suggestion that “good” newspapers are supposed to be ideologically and politically neutral is amusing, but perhaps not really accurate. Good newspapers strive for accuracy and reliability — they correct mistakes and errors when they make them, for example — but no newspaper in the U.S. has ever been politically and ideologically neutral.
It should also be noted that the NYT is not really “fairly far down in accuracy” — it falls within the ‘green zone’ of reliability, while most of the outlets rated by adfontesmedia do not. Even 60 Minutes, which we always thought of as a bastion of accuracy, is rated lower that the NYT….
“Good newspapers strive for accuracy and reliability — they correct mistakes and errors when they make them, for example — but no newspaper in the U.S. has ever been politically and ideologically neutral.”
Agreed. If you really want to learn a topic, get a series of books written by experts in the topic. For a topic like Israel/Palestine, where educated opinions vary considerably, you may need to get the best books from opposing camps and try to “triangulate” on areas of agreement, and then try to form your own best opinion on the areas of disagreement. Which of course will require more reading…
The ideal that newspapers and magazines were supposed to be a short cut to this process (i.e. the highly trained journalists do this research and unbiased analysis for you) is unfortunately a rare occurrence.
Thanks for linking to this. I’ve also been frustrated with the NYT, but when I mentioned reporting errors or bias in discussion with ideologically pro Palestine colleagues they would say that NYT is in fact favorable to Israel (!) or that the error I noted is just a normal editorial oversight that any publication could and does make. The Yale/Pinker study shows statistically clear imbalance. Unfortunately, I have already determined that it’s useless to debate my ideological colleagues.
Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”
The problem is that there are hundreds of such small slights. Over time, for the daily reader, they have the effect of creating in the reader the perspective the paper favors. The Times is clever that way. No single slight is enough to discredit it, so it keeps going. The problem obtains in the aggregate.
FWIW, a rough back of envelope calculation tells that the average Israeli is 13x more likely to have known a 10/7 victim than an average USian to have known a 9/1l victim.
I read Posner’s Case Closed. It was very good. Of course, for what it’s worth, this is no surprise to anyone who watched the NYT manage the Russia Hoax.
Yep, the NYT is hugely biased over Israel; ditto anything to do with trans ideology, ditto anything to do with race, especially crime and race, and indeed ditto anything else of woke salience.
If you read the NYT regularly and digest it uncritically, you will have the following worldview (not a complete list):
-Israel is a colonialist oppressor that is likely committing genocide on an oppressed Palestinian population.
-Racism is as harmful as ever in the United States. It has not abated despite decades of legislation to eradicate it. In fact, it is even more pervasive…”systemic” even. Failure to detect this pervasiveness is itself evidence of one’s racism. Asking for evidence of the pervasiveness is also evidence of racism.
-Thousands of unarmed black men are gunned down every year by police.
-The wage gap still exists and is prima facie evidence of sexism against women.
-There is no biological basis for sex. Male and female exist on a spectrum. Self-identification is all that is needed to determine sex…a person’s gametes are irrelevant to the determination of male vs. female.
-Open borders is the correct moral position on immigration. Millions of people want to come to this country…we should let them in. It is offensive to note that people are in this country illegally…hence the invention of the term “undocumented”.
-Islam is a religion of peace and is completely compatible with Western values, such as free speech and the rights of women. “Jihad” means a spiritual struggle, not actual warfare.
-Radical Islam doesn’t actually exist…nobody truly believes in things like martyrdom. Rather, people that are oppressed by Western imperialism act out and rise up against it, and we incorrectly label this as “religious fundamentalism”.
Acts of terrorism against the US and its people are always reactive to what we are doing to the terrorists. Other peoples have no real agency and do not have their own ideologies independent of what we are doing.
-Capitalism is extremely flawed. Some of form of collective ownership of the means of production must be implemented on a large scale.
-The US is generally a horrible place. How is this reconciled with the open borders position above? Don’t ask.
-The US has a horrible history. It was and is racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic. The Constitution was written by self-interested, racist white men. Therefore the document, and our form of government, is fundamentally flawed. Like a house made of rotten wood, it must be completely dismantled and replaced with something radically different.
-We need a woman president. That is a non-negotiable characteristic of any future Democratic presidential nominee.
There are many others…who would care to add to this list?
Where did the attitudes exemplified at the NYT, NPR, etc. etc. come from?
The reigning delusions of the 13th-15th centuries—divine right of hereditary rulers, infallibility of holy Mother Church, the magic of indulgences and saints’ relics, etc.—were all propagated by the Church monks of the late medieval academic institutions. Today’s woke mythologies—the existence of mythical creatures such as “trans women”, the “whiteness” and “colonial” character of scientific method, the delusion of the blank slate, the “genocide” of every Israeli defensive war, etc. etc.—are all propagated by academics of the grievance studies and related captured domains. Years ago, the radical, dissident writer Paul Goodman was even more correct than he realized, when he described the entire academic establishment as “schoolmonks”.
I’m grateful for outlets such Substack and X. That line about “view themselves” was widely vilified on X. Many people were posting screenshots of the original piece. I think otherwise the NYT would not have corrected the “error.”
I agree. And in the old days Twitter was run by people with the same editorial opinion as the NYT, who thus would not have allowed posts that embarrassed the NYT. Musk buying Twitter really has been significant.
Indeed; they clearly saw that that comment was ridiculous and decided to “explain” it. But I don’t understand the “explanation”; do you?
After September of 1939, Poles had a widespread perception that they were victims of a German invasion. This no doubt led to the Polish genocide against Germany in 1944-45, when the Polish 1st Armoured Division under General Stanisław Maczek entered Germany together with Poland’s other military allies.
As for the negative news about Trump, I would like to ask how one could do news reports about the examples above without conveying negativity? Is negativity necessarily a case of bias?
As objectively as I know how to put it, we have a president and major political party who are up-ending the norms of how people vote and who can vote. Regardless of the past (Dems did some gerrymandering, for example), it is the news of the day.
Agree with this. The current conditions are extreme.
I’m squarely on the side of Israel in the current conflict although I despise Netanyahu and blame alot of the problems on him. Recently I saw a video by Mehdi Hasan excoriating Bill Maher ( a person with whom i generally agree) for his ignorance on this topic. I was a bit shocked by the things Hasan mentioned although I suspect there are counter-arguments to his points. But there are also counter-counter agruements to those, ad infinitum. I despair of every having a clear idea of what has gone on there over the last 80 or so years.
If I had the means I would comission a work of history on this conflict. It would involve a large group of highly informed individuals – many would be ‘neutral’ ( but where to find them? China or India?) and many would be on one side or the other. Each topic, event issue would be discussed, debated etc with the neutral individuals distilling it down to agreed-on events and disputed events with differing perspecitves – this would be a VERY long work. I suspect that if it could be done, when it was finished some blame would clearly be placed on inept negotiators but most would be placed on the religious fanatics and their supporters on both sides. Religious fanatics dont care about death and destruction and arent interested in compromise. ‘God’ doesnt compromise and has given very clear instructions about what should happen to his enemies.
My guess is that the religous fanatics and their supporters would historically comprise about 10-20% of the Isreali population and 85-95% of the palestinian population.
NYT is definitely biased on Israel.
But the list of headlines about Trump you show is actually 100% accurate. You’re wearing rose coloured glasses if you think that is biased. It’s just stating facts.
Consider:
1) U.S. national parks. Deferred maintenance has been a growing problem under several successive administrations. The multibillion-dollar backlog, which declined little under the Biden administration, remains barely changed under Trump. The funds diversion was a policy choice given the 250th-anniversary preparation in D.C., and the amount pales in comparison with the backlog. Yet this headline suggests that Trump caused the overall problem, as opposed to Congresses of both parties over the years failing to appropriate sufficient funds.
2) Media. Correct and closely mirrors Trump’s own statements.
3) Kennedy Center. They assign the moral high ground to Kennedy Center “supporters”—meaning those opposed to Trump. It apparently escapes them that one could “support” the center and not recoil at Trump’s proposals. There are grounds for this story, but the template is endlessly recyclable: report on people getting stirred by “speculation” about “possible” events that are neither scheduled nor approved.
4) Census. While accurate as fact, this also functions as spin aimed at dividing Trump’s supporters. Some red states will still gain under Trump’s proposal; some blue states will lose. Internal migration and natural population growth assure that, independent of Trump. Red states like Texas simply wouldn’t gain as much as they would if non-green-card holders were counted.
5) Trade war. This is another story meant to fracture the Trump coalition. “Their” and “them” are doing a lot of work in this headline. Understandably so: the vast majority of Trump voters support his trade policies. The main headline works to portray the minority in opposition as representative of Trump’s coalition.
The slants, omissions, and distortions always run in the same direction. They are harder to spot when one shares the underlying bias.
But I will grant this: The above are improvements on an influential NYT “news analysis” piece headlined with “Trump Gives White Supremacists an Unequivocal Boost.” The piece then blatantly misrepresented his “very fine people on both sides” comment. To this day, many of Trump’s opponents still falsely believe that he called white supremacists “fine people”—when the full audio and video files show that he denounced them unequivocally. That is both the intent and the effect of these kinds of headlines.
Did you even read the stories? I did. Sounds like you didn’t.
Many of these stories have also been in the WSJ, especially about trade. Stories that border states are complaining about the Canadian tariffs and the resulting counter tariffs. There’s no evidence that any of his new tariffs add helping anyone.
Since the WSJ caters to a more conservative audience and comments are enabled on a large fraction of the articles, I’ve noticed a trend: Trump is losing a lot of support. While there’s still a core MAGA constituency he’s lost a lot of previous support. He gets trashed regularly by people who say they voted for him.
I’m pretty surprised at the amount of support this megalomaniac wannabe authoritarian has on this site.
Each story here is newsworthy. My focus, however, is almost entirely on the headlines and the ways they are used to frame a reader’s conceptions. Journalists and editors know full well that busy readers often skim them and draw conclusions. When readers choose to continue reading, they often read the lead sentence or paragraphs before skimming or bailing on a long piece. It is not unusual to find core information that might call the headline into question buried deep in an article. More importantly, accurate facts in the body do not mean a headline is unbiased.
Noticing the phenomenon says nothing about one’s politics. This matter of framing perceptions in a desired direction has been going on for as long as reporting has been a profession.
Yes, of course. I was pointing out that ALL THE HEADLINES ARE ABOUT TRUMP. As I said, I despise the man and his acts, but there are other things going on in the world.
OK, I misinterpreted your message.