It’s not that the New York Times gets a lot of stories regarding Israel completely wrong. It’s that every one of its “mistakes” happens to skew in the exact same ideological direction. It’s a statistical miracle.
“Breaking News,” the New York Times posted on X this week, “a plane flying from Dubai to Israel was diverted after an altercation between the pilot and co-pilot, Israeli officials said.”
The “altercation” entailed what looks to be a radicalized Islamist Flydubai pilot stabbing his Indian co-pilot and attempting to hijack a plane filled with around 180 Israelis aboard and crash it. He nearly succeeded. While the plane plummeted over 17,000 feet, passengers and crew got into the cockpit — reportedly the door had been opened by the wounded captain — and neutralized the terrorist. One passenger, a doctor, worked to save the captain. Another passenger took over the controls and landed the plane.
The New York Times responded to criticism about its misleading headline, contending that live coverage contained “all the facts we’re able to confirm” at the time. “Unlike activists and partisans, we don’t publish speculation or unverified information.”
Of course it does.
The New York Times could not have known all the details at the time, but it immediately downplayed the potential terrorist angle. It’s what the New York Times has been doing for decades.
Last year, for instance, after a Hezbollah-inspired Islamist attempted to massacre a daycare filled with 4- and 5-year-old Jewish children, the New York Times published stories with headlines such as, “The Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was a Quiet Restaurant Worker” and “Family Members of Michigan Synagogue Attacker Died in Airstrike in Lebanon.” Last week, the paper’s Jerusalem reporter, Isabel Kershner, lamented that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”
Israeli officials had not made any definitive statements about what had happened on the Flydubai, nor had they settled on an account. But the New York Times grabbed the most convenient theory and passed it along as the definitive account of events. The paper’s first instinct is to whitewash and rationalize anti-Jewish terrorism. And it has gone on far longer than people might realize.
It is often forgotten that the New York Times, which had famously whitewashed Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, also downplayed the Holocaust. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, a German Jew who assiduously avoided any connection to his faith or culture, didn’t want the New York Times to be seen as offering any special pleadings.
During the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, for instance, the New York Times published an entire editorial avoiding the words “Jew” or “Jewish” with the same conviction it now avoids referring to Islamist suicide as terrorists. It merely noted that “500,000 persons” had been “herded into less than 7 percent of Warsaw’s buildings” and that “400,000 persons were deported.”
Where were they deported? To their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp.
As the modern Zionist movement picked up momentum, the New York Times editorial page relentlessly rallied against a prospective Jewish state, and it has never stopped. “I have been trying to instruct the people around here on the subject of the word ‘Jews’, i.e., that they are neither a race nor a people, etc.,” Sulzberger wrote to his Washington Bureau Chief in 1942.
The paper even railed against wartime rescue missions that would have sent Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe to British Palestine. When the Roosevelt administration was looking for a Jewish liaison in 1942, Sulzberger lobbied to ensure that the post didn’t go to “some Zionist or active Jewish Nationalist.”
Nothing has changed. The opinion page is filled with “anti-Zionists,” including an outsize number of self-hating Jewish editorialists and op-ed writers.
For decades, the New York Times even refused to send Jewish reporters to cover Israel. At the same time, the paper had no problem employing Arab correspondents and reporters to cover the Islamic world. These days, many of them are histories of pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitic rhetoric, including praising Hitler.
Over the years, the New York Times’s news coverage regularly oscillates between blatant propaganda and vile moral relativism. In one famous 2000 piece, the paper ran a photo of a bloodied young man being dragged by a baton-wielding Israeli policeman. The caption identified the man as a Palestinian who had been beaten at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In reality, the man’s name was Tuvia Grossman, a Chicago yeshiva student, who had been dragged out of a taxi and stabbed by a Palestinian mob. The Israeli police officer was protecting him.
In another loathsome 2002 piece, “2 Girls, Divided by War, Joined in Carnage,” the New York Times ran side-by-side portraits of Rachel Levy, a 17-year-old who was murdered while doing some last-minute shopping before Sabbath, and Ayat al-Akhras, a suicide bomber who killed her, treating them both as victims.
You can fill a book with similar coverage.
In 2019, four years before the Gaza war, the New York Times ran a Der Stürmer-like cartoon in its international edition of Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog wearing a Star of David around his neck being walked by a blind President Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke.
All of which is to say, it was unsurprising that after Oct. 7, 2023, the New York Times emerged as one of the leading legitimizers of Hamas propaganda, giving virtually every blood libel a veneer of credibility.
Days after the massacre, the New York Times ran a front-page story accusing Israel of a missile attack on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing patients, children, and staff. The story, meant to divert attention away from those who started the war, incited worldwide condemnation and recrimination, and marked the beginning of the mainstreaming of the “genocide” hoax against Israel.
But none of it was true. Israel didn’t hit the hospital. A misfired Islamic Jihad missile did. Hundreds of people did not die because the missile landed in a parking lot. Ahli Arab Hospital claimed without any substantiation because they rely almost solely on Gazan officials.
The New York Times had, as it often does about Israel, published “speculation” and “unverified information.”
The New York Times formula is to mislead readers with dramatic stories and imagery that embed in the mind and then offer corrections and “clarifications” that barely anyone sees.
In July 2025, the New York Times ran a front-page story lamenting the starvation in Gaza, featuring a haunting photograph of an emaciated Palestinian toddler named Mohammed Zakaria al Mutawaq. The caption and placement of the picture were meant to convince readers that the boy’s skeletal appearance had been the result of an Israeli-induced famine. It worked.
Unmentioned was that the boy suffered from cerebral palsy and other serious preexisting medical conditions. His condition wasn’t caused by Israeli blockades or famine, because there was never any famine. It was a neurological disorder he had from birth.
After significant backlash and criticism from independent journalists, the New York Times was forced again to issue a clarification admitting it had learned of the boy’s underlying health issues.
Hey, the New York Times published pieces that “contain all the facts” it was “able to confirm” at the time.
The damage was done, of course. The striking photograph had served its purpose. The Palestinian photographer who took the image, Saher Alghorra, was awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.
But perhaps the pinnacle of the New York Times’s sleazy, irresponsible crusade against Israel came when it published anti-Israel zealot Nick Kristoff’s embarrassing pseudo-journalistic “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” The piece offered not a single word that could be verified or substantiated. It was merely a collection of scatological fantasies borne in the antizionist’s imagination, including the contention that Israelis train dogs to rape prisoners. The story failed to meet the journalistic standards expected of a cub reporter at a local paper.
It is unlikely that any educated person takes Kristoff seriously. Most of the damage is done in the ostensible news pages. In a recent peer-reviewed study, Yale professor Edieal Pinker analyzed 1,559 New York Times news articles published between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, that referenced both Israel and Gaza and found that the framing disproportionately held Israel responsible for the war while whitewashing the role of the terrorist army of Hamas, which has yet to uphold the terms of the ceasefire.
HOW MS. RACHEL WENT FROM BELOVED CHILDREN’S STREAMING SENSATION TO ‘MOUTHPIECE FOR HAMAS’
No one should expect the New York Times to be uncritical of Israel. It should merely treat Israel and Jews with the same journalistic integrity it would any other people. No such luck.
Instead, the New York Times spread deception for decades. Which is why we have no reason to give the New York Times the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the Flydubai story — or any story concerning the Jewish State.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
