“If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” goes the famed journalistic dictum commonly attributed to legendary Edward Eulenberg, a longtime reporter and editor for City News Bureau and the Chicago Daily News.
The admonition, even if hyperbolic, reflects a sense of pride in the craft and professionalism that those in journalism once held. The quote was first credited to Eulenberg in a 1976 column, which also happens to be the year in which Gallup polls recorded the highest level of trust and confidence in mass media—72% stated they held a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust.
Nearly 50 years later, in 2025, Gallup recorded the lowest-ever level of trust in the media—a mere 28% expressed a great deal or fair amount of trust. A likely factor: the abandonment of the journalistic zeal embodied by Eulenberg.
Case in point has been New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s article on May 11, alleging that Israel maintains a “standard operating procedure” of sexual violence toward Palestinian detainees. Similarly illustrative have been those attempting to defend Kristof’s “reporting.”
The many substantive reasons Kristof’s allegations lack credibility have been widely recounted. Many of those reasons come down to Kristof all but openly rejecting Eulenberg’s advice.
As CAMERA wrote, believing Kristof’s allegations requires trusting the untrustworthy. Far from demonstrating a zeal akin to verifying a mother’s love, Kristof’s “journalism” was more analogous to trusting in a wicked stepmother’s love.
Take Kristof’s central allegation that there is a “standard operating procedure” of sexual violence. Readers who bother to follow the trail of Kristof’s citations will discover that the evidence amounts to mere assertions of truth by activists with documented histories of dishonesty and hostility toward Israel. This includes, for example, Miloon Kothari, who believes Jews control social media. Another, Euro-Med’s chairman, Ramy Abdu, blatantly falsified a map to portray Israelis as sex predators. Surely, they wouldn’t lie when it comes to allegations involving Jews and sexual violence, Kristof would have us believe.
That Kristof has a documented history of gullibility in the face of extraordinary allegations only further highlights the absurdity of his piece of “journalism.”
But this episode in the decline of journalism isn’t only about Kristof. Others in the industry rushed to defend the indefensible.
Consider Abdallah Fayyad of The Boston Globe, who, while admitting that he “cannot verify” Kristof’s claims, defends his allegations nonetheless by again asking us to trust in the love of haters. (“Don’t dismiss Nicholas Kristof’s reporting on Israeli prisons,” May 22). Fayyad’s defense amounts to pointing at the same set of activists and insisting we trust in their credibility.
That includes sources such as Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur who is on video admitting that her “deeply held personal views would compromise [her] objectivity” about Israel. Among those views: the belief that the United States is “subjugated” by the “Jewish lobby.”
The sources are telling us not to trust them, and yet journalists like Fayyad and Kristof will still rely on them.
The debasement of journalism at the Times also goes beyond Kristof. Head of opinion Kathleen Kingsburg co-authored with Kristof a defense of his allegations (“Your Questions About Nicholas Kristof’s Column on Palestinians and Sexual Assault,” May 21). The intellectual dishonesty of their joint column is astonishing.
Consider, for example, how they answered the question, “How can you trust the sources?”
Kingsburg wrote: “The Times doesn’t rule out interviewing people or considering them credible because they were in prison or detained. Times Opinion also doesn’t deem a person’s account of sexual violence to be credible or not based on his or her social media history.”
Kristof followed up with: “It serves no one to automatically discount people’s accounts because of their identity or beliefs.”
It’s a deliberate misrepresentation of the criticism. Judge Roy K. Altman at The Free Press never said that the witnesses lacked credibility because they were imprisoned; he criticized Kristof’s use of anonymity. OSINT researcher Eitan Fischberger didn’t discount Ramy Abdu’s claims because of his identity; he pointed out Abdu’s history of using blood libels to whip up hatred of Jews. CAMERA pointed to the deeply flawed methodology of Kristof’s sources, not just their “social-media history.”
Kingsburg and Kristof avoided answering these and other criticisms by lying about what the criticisms were.
Their dishonest defense is yet another reminder of the vanishing of integrity and accountability from the field of journalism. The industry is being eroded from the inside.
Take one final example, something CAMERA noticed, and The Free Beacon wrote about in regard to Kristof’s initial column. One of Kristof’s sources was a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The second person identified in the report as a “journalist” by CPJ is Ismail al-Ghoul, an operative of Hamas’s elite Nukhba forces that led the Oct. 7 massacres in southern Israel. Al-Ghoul is far from the only terrorist CPJ has rebranded as a “journalist.”
Researchers have identified dozens of examples from just the last few years. In fact, CAMERA pointed out more than a decade ago the organization’s practice of extending the label of “journalist” to operatives and propagandists belonging to terrorist organizations and their affiliates.
The industry isn’t just attaching their names and credibility to Kristof’s unbelievable allegations; they’re equating themselves with terrorist propagandists. The CPJ, CNN, BBC and others are telling us that their reporters are functionally equivalent to terrorist operatives and propagandists, that there is no difference between an Oct. 7 terrorist and the likes of CNN journalist and cable-news host Christiane Amanpour.
This isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, true. Reporters should be the loudest in rejecting Hamas’s efforts to wear their skin. Journalists should be the first to challenge Kristof’s dishonesty.
That they are largely silent says everything about the moment in which we live. Trust in journalism is at an all-time low because journalists are debasing their own noble profession. The public no longer trusts the media because the media is telling them not to.
