New York Times columnist Bret Stephens called for the Anti-Defamation League to be shut down, arguing that it has failed to end antisemitism. But what about institutions that not only fail to stop antisemitism but actively worsen it?
If Stephens wants to protect American Jewry and Israel, then he should start with the institution that pays him.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, The New York Times has abandoned journalistic principles and shown bias against Israel so pervasive and consequential that it supports those seeking Israel’s destruction.
On the morning of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the Times described the perpetrators as “Palestinian militants.” That choice was no accident. The paper of record has for decades refused to regard the murder of Israelis as terrorism.
In the two years after, the paper published thousands of war stories. Search them, and you will struggle to find a single photo of a Hamas fighter firing a rocket, carrying a weapon or doing anything that might remind readers that Israel faced a ruthless enemy.
Former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman exposed his own outlet’s systematic self-censorship in Gaza, documenting how reporters there knew not to film terrorists or rocket launches. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper discovered this in 2009, during “Operation Cast Lead,” when he wrote that “all images that come out of Gaza are controlled by Hamas” and that journalists knew exactly “where you’re allowed to point the camera and where you’re not allowed to point the camera.”
Unlike Cooper, the Times never admitted this to its readers. It published only the images Hamas permitted, printed the stories Hamas allowed and then pretended to offer an “independent” account of the war.
Take the frequent reports suggesting that Israel was indiscriminately attacking hospitals. A story might mention a gun battle but have no photos of the terrorists. Worse, sources were repeatedly cited claiming there were no terrorists at the hospitals, as if members of the Israel Defense Forces were having firefights with ghosts.
Published photos were often misleading or inaccurate. One showed children being fed alongside a story of starvation. Another pictured an emaciated child used to suggest famine, though his appearance was related to preexisting health conditions. His mother and brother showed no signs of starvation.
The imagery reinforced the paper’s bias. By leaning heavily on photographs of suffering, especially children, it was impossible for Israel to defend itself. The blame always focused on Israel’s culpability rather than Hamas’s for creating the situation where children would die. The sole purpose of the war, to ensure another massacre could never happen, was subsumed by the focus on Palestinian suffering.
One egregious act was publishing satellite images of Israeli troop movements, clearly aiding terrorists. Has the Times published satellite images of Russian troop movements in Ukraine or U.S. troop movements in the Gulf?
The most consequential single act of journalistic malpractice in the war’s first weeks was the paper’s coverage of the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion on Oct. 17, 2023. An initial headline declared: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinian Officials Say.” The source was Hamas.
The claim was false. The explosion was caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that landed in the hospital parking lot. The death toll was a fraction of the 500 the Times reported. But before the truth emerged, the coverage had already ignited protests across the Middle East.
Six days later, it published an editor’s note confessing that its early coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.” Internal communications obtained by Vanity Fair showed that even some in the Times newsroom recognized immediately that attributing “something so big on one source without having tried to verify it” was a serious error. And yet they published it anyway.
Preferring its own narrative
This established a pattern: By publishing unverifiable claims, the Times legitimized many falsehoods, reinforcing ongoing distortions throughout its war coverage.
The Al-Ahli hospital was not an isolated case.
On Nov. 15, 2023, the Times reported that Israel had “stormed” Al-Shifa Hospital, which “staff and Hamas insisted was just a medical center.” When Israeli forces presented evidence of weapons, uniforms, and military equipment found inside—evidence corroborated by the National Security Council spokesman, who confirmed that the United States had its own intelligence supporting Israel’s assertion—the Times announced that it “was unable to verify the provenance of the weapons and equipment in the images.”
The implication was unmistakable: Israel had planted the evidence. Anyone who watched the 2006 PBS documentary showing Hamas using the hospital knew this was false. The Times preferred its own narrative. Later, when the IDF took journalists on tours of the tunnels and showed them the weapons, the Times continued to cast doubt.
This major media outlet gave a designated terrorist group more credibility than a democratic U.S. ally, whose intelligence Washington confirmed. This isn’t skepticism, it’s taking a side.
The most sustained and consequential distortion was the casualty figures. The Times repeated death tolls from the Hamas-run Health Ministry—figures the paper knew included thousands of dead terrorists—with the disclaimer that the figures “did not distinguish between civilians and combatants.” The Times knew the numbers were propaganda but published them anyway. Only Israeli figures were suspect. The IDF was treated like the most ineffective army in history, failing to kill any of its enemies.
Honest contextualization would have told readers that the civilian-to-combatant ratio was not historically extraordinary—that it compared favorably to other major urban warfare campaigns—and that the genocide charge the paper amplified in its pages was not remotely supported by the data. The Times chose instead to let Hamas’s numbers stand unchallenged, repeated and legitimized, accumulating day after day into a portrait of Israeli conduct that bore little relationship to the documented record—and served the terrorist organization’s global information campaign more efficiently than anything Hamas’s own press office could have engineered.
Treating war like sport
The newspaper treats Israeli wars like sport: Most casualties win victimhood. Israel loses for defending its citizens instead of using them as shields. As journalist Ran Dagoni noted, if civilian deaths define morality, then Nazi Germany and Japan would be victims.
A study by professor Eytan Gilboa and Lilac Sigan found that the Times acknowledged 72 errors in its coverage between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024—48 of them specifically about Israel. The vast majority were identified not by the Times’s own editors but by outside critics. The corrections that followed were, in the researchers’ words, “late, vague and sometimes evasive.”
Their analysis of 1,398 pieces in the paper’s subscriber newsletter found that 46% of articles expressed empathy solely for Palestinians, while 10% expressed empathy for Israelis. Out of 647 empathetic articles about Palestinians, only two blamed Hamas for Palestinian suffering. Some 72 op-eds were critical of Israel; 23 criticized Hamas. Of 50 articles about the hostages, 11 were critical of Israel, compared to 28 that blamed Hamas.
A separate study by Edieal Pinker of Yale University’s School of Management examined 1,561 articles and found that the word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times while “Hamas” appeared 8,499 times. From Oct. 8 onward, in Pinker’s words, “Israel has been the sole aggressor that seemingly bears no costs from conducting the war except for a loss of international support and public sympathy.” Israeli suffering after Oct. 7 received minimal coverage. Palestinian personal accounts were featured relentlessly. Hamas’s responsibility was systematically minimized.
A comparison of conflict coverage shows how much attention the Times gave to the Israel-Gaza war relative to other major conflicts. According to McGill University professor and historian Gil Troy, the Times published 80 stories on the U.S.-led battle for Mosul, Iraq; 198 stories on the war in Ethiopia’s Tigay region, which killed 600,000 people in a year; and 5,434 stories about Syria’s civil war over 13 years. In the first nine months of the Gaza war, the Times published 6,656 articles—far surpassing its coverage of any other contemporary conflict, and demonstrating a unique intensity and one-sidedness.
The cumulative effect is that Hamas’s responsibility for initiating and sustaining the war was minimized. Israel’s responsibility for everything that followed was magnified.
Perhaps nothing reveals the institutional rot more clearly than what happened after the Times published its investigation into Hamas’s sexual violence on Oct. 7. To its credit, the paper compiled the most rigorously documented account of Hamas’s atrocities published by any major American outlet. And a faction of Times journalists tried to kill it.
When they failed, they leaked internal criticism to pro-Hamas outlets, which declared the investigation “debunked” and “discredited.” The paper published a subsequent article that quietly contradicted one of the original testimonies without disclosing that it was doing so, helping to fuel denials that Hamas committed rape during the attacks. A podcast about the investigation was shelved, and the Times did not submit the story for Pulitzer Prize consideration.
Except for Stephens, the Times’s columnists have ranged from critical to openly hostile toward Israel. Thomas L. Friedman’s near-weekly denunciations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have become so predictable that “I hate Bibi Netanyahu” might as well be printed on his office door. The op-ed page, ostensibly committed to a diversity of viewpoints, has published Jewish voices almost exclusively when they are critical of Israel—figures like Friedman, Michelle Goldberg and the far-left Peter Beinart, who represent a minority of Jewish opinion, but who fit the paper’s narrative of Israel as Goliath and the Palestinians as David.
Pro-Israel Jewish voices—the overwhelming majority of Jewish opinion—rarely appear.
Among the most egregious examples of those who merited space was the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, whose two op-eds failed to mention that he was a colonel in Hamas’s Medical Services.
A decided lack of balance
Then there is the execrable Nicholas Kristof, who regularly traffics in anti-Israel propaganda and who outdid himself with an antisemitic screed that included the outlandish claim that Israel trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.
There is a word for journalism that systematically suppresses evidence of terrorist activities, amplifies terrorist propaganda, undermines its own best investigative reporting under activist pressure, applies a double standard that consistently disadvantages a democratic ally fighting for its survival and generates public opinion that has materially contributed to the erosion of support for Israel across the American political spectrum. That word is not bias. It is not sloppiness. It is not the inevitable imperfection of covering a complex conflict under difficult conditions.
It is complicity.
Bret Stephens is one of the most talented writers in American journalism and one of the few voices at the Times willing to say things that make his colleagues uncomfortable. That makes what he does important. But it also makes the institution he works for more dangerous—because his presence gives the paper a cover of balance it does not deserve.
If Stephens truly wants to fight antisemitism and defend the future of American Jewry, as well as journalistic standards, he should suggest closing The New York Times.
