All The News That’s Fit To Tint

The New York Times shades its reporting against Israel, according to two Bar-Ilan U. analyses.

Intense scrutiny: The New York Times’ Mideast reporting is studied so carefully because its influence on U.S. policy and public opinion is enormous.

Jews have long had a love-hate relationship with The New York Times.

In June 2001, fed up with The Times’ perceived biased coverage of Israel, a prominent New York rabbi wrote an Opinion essay in The Jewish Week calling on subscribers of The Times to cancel, or at least suspend, their subscriptions for the 10-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. He said it was important to “send a message” to The Times, citing several examples of extreme insensitivity to Jewish readers during  the height of the Second Intifada. Particularly upsetting was The Times’ visual coverage of the annual Salute to Israel parade, which featured a large photo of a tiny group of anti-Zionist Satmar Jewish men protesting the proceedings rather than showing the many thousands of enthusiastic marchers on Fifth Avenue. 

But as if to underscore how indispensable the paper of record is for so many, the rabbi confessed to me that after he stopped his Times subscription, he started buying a copy of the paper each morning at a newsstand because his wife missed the arts and culture stories.

Measuring or quantifying media in terms of bias – and especially intentional bias – may be impossible, given that despite the aim of providing balanced reporting, journalism is a completely subjective enterprise. Deciding whether or not an event is worth covering, how long or short an article should be, whether it merits a front page headline or should be buried inside, gets a big photo or none at all, etc. – it’s all up to the editors. Those whose publications cover international affairs agree that reporting on the Middle East is the most scrutinized, controversial and criticized of all their foreign coverage. 

Keep in mind that for all of those who feel that Israel is treated unfairly, there are pro-Palestinian observers who claim the opposite. For example, The Intercept, an American news website that describes itself as “left-wing,” published its analysis of major media reporting, which found that “The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza showed a consistent bias against Palestinians,” giving “little attention to the unprecedented impact of Israel’s siege and bombing campaign on both children and journalists in the Gaza Strip.”

Despite the challenges of objective research, there have been numerous academic efforts over the years to analyze mainstream media coverage of Israel. Two detailed studies of New York Times reporting, undertaken by journalist Lilac Sigan, in collaboration with Professor Eytan Gilboa of Bar-Ilan’s Center for International Communication, conclude, perhaps not surprisingly to this audience, that the most influential newspaper in America is biased against Israel. 

Their 2022 study of New York Times coverage of Israel, done when a center-left coalition (including an Arab party) led the government, found a “failure to cover terror organization activity during the peak terror year.” Of the 361 articles about Israel that were analyzed, 53 percent were graded as negative. By contrast, only eight articles were about the terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and only four of those articles were negative. 

“In my opinion,” Sigan said, “this is the worst kind of bias …. turning a blind eye to Palestinian terror” and giving readers only “half the story.”  

Israel recorded 2,600 acts of terror that year, 204 of which were “significant.” But The Times “made it look like there were only five deadly attacks” in 2022, Sigan noted. 

The Bar-Ilan study of The Times’ coverage of Israel’s war with Hamas, from October 7, 2023 to June 2024, is in some ways even more disturbing than the 2022 analysis in that it cites a sharp ideological and generational clash within the newsroom. The report offers evidence of “the internal pressure The Times’ young journalists apply on senior editors to adopt highly biased coverage practices and norms.” The most notable and disturbing example deals with the response to the paper’s December 28, 2023 major report on Hamas’s horrific sexual crimes against women by Hamas on October 7. That article, based on 150 testimonies and two months of reporting by a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times writer, was seen as damaging to “the pro-Hamas cause” by “some radical Times journalists,” according to the Bar-Ilan study. “They opposed its very publishing and, after failing to convince the editors to shelve it, attacked The Times’ credibility by leaking internal information to a radical left pro-Hamas media outlet… and intimidated their editors. 

“Far from loyal colleagues, they scorn colleagues with different views and think they should be political activists rather than reliable and professional reporters.”

The 14-page report asserts that The Times’ coverage of the war “demonstrates serious errors, inadequate corrections, serious omissions and poor editorial supervision,” adding: “These were not just sporadic failures. They seem to represent an endemic malaise.”

The report gives special attention to the initial Times website headline after the Al-Ahli Hospital missile attack of October 17, 2023. The headline that read: “Israeli Airstrike Killed 500 At A Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say,” had five errors in 10 words. In truth, it was a failed Islamic Jihad rocket that landed on the hospital parking lot and killed 50 people, according to Hamas’s Ministry of Health. In addition, the report noted, it took several corrections, initially marginal and finally only after President Biden called the headline “irresponsible,” for the editors to more fully admit their error.

That pattern of reluctant and insufficient corrections repeated itself in the ensuing months. The report said that many of the Times errors were “identified by external sources, not by the newspaper itself,” and that corrections were “late, vague and sometimes evasive, and seem to be used as a cover-up for much bigger reporting failures, and not as a tool to improve accuracy and journalistic practices.”

Although The Times admitted that it erred in “relying too heavily in reports by Hamas” regarding its use of  casualty figures in the Al-Ahli case, “the practice did not change.” 

In closing, the report states that “The Times pretends nothing has changed, but its newsroom has totally changed and does not uphold the same standards it once did…. Given these circumstances, a Public Editor could have helped to preserve high professional standards, but The Times canceled this position in 2017. Perhaps it is time to restore it.”

As detailed and compelling as the Bar-Ilan studies are, they may well be dismissed as biased in their own right by some because these analyses were undertaken by an Israeli university. Similar criticism could be directed at Mideast studies produced by American universities as well at a time when ideology and politics have pervaded every corner of our institutions and lives, and when people can offer “alternative truths” without shame.

There may never be a consensus on such a hot-button issue as the Israel-Palestinian conflict and how media coverage impacts on government decisions and public opinion. But in the meantime, those of us who still respect the profession of journalism are obliged to point out the facts as we see them and trust that others will see the light. 

Note: If you missed Part I of my Media Monitor series, “How And Why The Media Targets Israel,” click HERE.

Coming soon: Part III … Suggestions on how to evaluate Mideast reporting, with examples.