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