The National Center for Public Policy Research, a beneficial shareholder of The New York Times Company, is demanding that the publication turn over documents tied to the publication of a New York Times opinion piece that accused Israeli authorities of training dogs to sexually assault Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Mark Goldfeder, director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which is sending a letter (viewed by JNS) to the company on behalf of the NCPPR, said that the demand is meant to investigate whether the Times bypassed its own corporate governance and risk oversight policies when it published Nicholas Kristof’s column on May 11 and the follow-up column published on May 21.
The letter states that the stockholder’s demand is “pursuant to New York Business Corporation Law Section 624, New York common law and the shareholder common law right of inspection to inspect certain books and records under the company’s control.”
Goldfeder said the shareholder wants to know “whether the Times’ board and senior management are properly overseeing legal, reputational and financial risks tied to the company’s publication practices.”
“The demand is not about second-guessing ordinary editorial judgment or seeking reporter notes, drafts, confidential sources or internal editorial deliberations,” he told JNS. “It is focused on corporate governance and risk oversight: what systems the company has for verification, corrections, defamation-risk review, escalation of disputed reporting, and preventing distorted or biased coverage.”
“The request specifically asks whether those policies were followed, triggered, waived or bypassed in connection with Nicholas Kristof’s column, ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,’ and whether senior management or the board reviewed any legal, reputational, source-reliability, correction or standards issues arising from that publication,” Goldfeder said.
He told JNS that the Times tells investors that “its brand, reputation, journalistic reliability and public trust are central business assets, and that perceptions of bias or unreliability can affect subscribers, advertisers, employees, litigation risk and shareholder value.”
NCPRR is also asking for records “showing whether the board is actually monitoring those risks, including complaints, subscriber or advertiser reactions, threatened litigation, correction demands, internal studies and any board- or senior-management-level review of disputed coverage,” he added.
The four-page letter requests that the company contact Goldfeder to make arrangements “for the review of the demanded book of records.”
“In the event that the company does not respond to this letter or fails to permit inspection and copying of the demanded documents within five business days from the receipt of this demand, we will seek appropriate relief to the fullest extent permitted under the law,” the letter concludes.
