Shareholders Sue New York Times Over ‘Biased’ Israel Coverage

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Shareholders sued The New York Times on Sept. 23, alleging the company has failed to prevent false reporting about Israel and other topics.

The State Board of Administration of Florida, representing the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund and National Center for Public Policy Research, filed the lawsuit in a New York court.

“The Company’s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company’s internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion that in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors,” the 48-page filing says.

Shareholders said that a whistleblower reported problems to the company’s internal channel for such issues in November 2023.

“I feel that I’m on a desk that is particularly biased against Israel … I can’t tell if the Masthead does not see that our desk is biased, does not see it as a problem to be resolved, or just hasn’t figured out how to get a handle on it,” the whistleblower was quoted as saying.

The person later presented 26 slides to a standards editor that described how the paper had rejected footage from a source because the source was “pro-Israel” and how a freelancer’s praise of Hitler was downplayed as “just some jokes.”

The whistleblower’s concerns, later expanded to include questions about the lack of a promised training on anti-Semitism, and the hiring of a freelancer who said he “supports the Palestinian struggle against occupation,” did not prompt any changes, according to the filing.

One incident outlined by shareholders was how The New York Times included a photograph of a child in its 2025 article, “Gazans Are Dying of Starvation,” without disclosing that the child had pre-existing health conditions, as Getty Images had noted days prior in captions of pictures of the child.

The paper later updated the photo’s information and said that “after publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.”

Evidence shows that controls the company promotes to the public, including standards review before content is published, are not working, as that and other incidents show, the lawsuit says.

It requests the court order The New York Times to show shareholders materials they requested to see in August, including all versions of the paper’s editorial standards since Jan. 1, 2020.

“This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose,” a spokesperson for the paper told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment. We will defend against the suit vigorously.“