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This is a guest essay written by Mallory Mosner.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
With 9.4 million digital subscribers in 2023 alone, The New York Times is by far the most subscribed to newspaper in the entire world.
Self-described as possessing an “unparalleled reputation for excellence” in journalism, The New York Times has been reporting on and building culture, as well as standards of journalistic conduct, for almost 200 years.
As Jewish “Spider-Man” writer Stan Lee famously wrote: “With great power comes great responsibility.” For their part, when it comes to the Jewish People (who are often the canaries in the coalmine of impending and extant societal rot), The New York Times has abrogated their purportedly righteous duty to present the truth with impartiality.
Last week, Jews around the world learned the horrifying news that Hamas brutally murdered six hostages, shortly before the IDF found them in Rafah (Gaza’s southern-most city). This was devastating news for so many reasons; one of these hostages, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was a young American peace activist whose parents had been advocating tirelessly to bring him home. His vibrant smile had become familiar to people around the world who hoped and prayed for his safe return.
And then, in the throes of this incomprehensible grief and loss, as news broke to a world largely ambivalent (at best) to Jewish or Israeli suffering, our supreme liberal media overlord in all its grand “integrity” pushed the following headline to its millions of subscribers:
It may seem innocuous to some; it was, after all, a direct quote from U.S. President Joe Biden. Alas, by the time this news broke, the news abroad had already confirmed very specifically that these hostages had been killed by Hamas. Ardent defenders of the so-called journalistic “standards” that The New York Times and its smug liberal media allies claim to possess will call attention to the quotation itself as justification for invoking the term “died” instead of “killed” or “murdered” here.
After all, it was only earlier last week that the Hamas-loving newspaper issued this headline, furtively glossing over the minor detail that those “killed” were literal terrorists (including a top Hamas commander):
Pointing to reductive guidelines in how quotations should be relayed in journalistic headlines deliberately ignores the active choice that publications and editors have in selecting whom they want to quote, and why. Justifying this as if there is a truly objective precedent for selection criteria on headlines, quotations, language and push notifications without any tendentious agenda — unless it is from a publication whose political views differ from yours, of course! — is willful, bizarre ignorance.
After all, who can forget the stunning feat of journalistic negligence back in October, when The New York Times instantly parroted the following disinformation, straight from their terror cronies without even a moment of fact-checking:
It was an “oversight” they would repeat again and again — one which would instantly cause a waterfall of irreparable damage, endangering both Jews and Israelis worldwide (and actively inhibiting progress in the war).
But the pain of the recent loss of these precious young hostages who had survived nearly 11 months of horror did not stop with last week’s disgusting headline. Then, in classic form, The New York Times had to beat Israel and Jews while we were down, capitalizing on the opportunity to politicize the murder of these hostages by once again diminishing the cause of their deaths and subrogating all blame onto Israel. Naturally, there are few things that The New York Times loves more than weaponizing Jews to cover up their systematic antisemitism:
Aside from never delivering an additional push notification confirming that the hostages were indeed killed by Hamas, the way this headline was written is deliberately intended to continue their mission of placing all blame for October 7th and all ensuing devastation in the Middle East squarely on Israel — to even go a step further and assert that “the good ones” in Israel also recognize and actively combat this. Naturally, those are the good, leftist, secular ones who concede that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a hook-nosed goblin, right?
Nothing about these headlines is surprising; they are a few among a treacherous sea of antisemitic hatred peddled by The New York Times and many other liberal papers. Only weeks ago, they referred to recently assassinated evil Hamas mastermind Ismail Haniyeh as “relatively pragmatic” without the least bit of irony. Amazingly, this was a step up from Reuters, which described the mass murderer as “moderate.”
The New York Times has steadfastly vilified Jewish people and Israel for a long time, but the vigor and fixation with which they have done so since October 7th is a testament to the deep moral rot festering in the mainstream (liberal) media, and corresponding pseudo-intellectual spaces.
Last month, when deficient antisemite U.S. Congresswoman Cori Bush lost her primary, The New York Times quickly jumped to place all blame for her defeat on Israel. It must be the Jews’ fault, and not her corrupt spending that she was federally investigated for, or her crappy voting record.
But none of this is new terrain for The New York Times. Indeed, their rich, “esteemed” history as the beacon of liberal virtue, intellect, and integrity is belied by their consistently hateful, well-documented antisemitic actions.
According to Laura Leff’s book, “Buried By The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” only 26 of 24,000 front-page stories covered the Holocaust during World War Two, most of which failed to report that the Nazis targeted Jews.
The Berlin bureau chief of The New York Times was overtly sympathetic towards Nazis during World War Two, writing puffy profiles of Nazi leaders and going so far as to say “the government would not tolerate persecution of the Jews and had established no discrimination against them.”
Astute readers will point out that The New York Times has largely been led by Jewish people. I would counter any woeful assumption that absolves an entire organization (or individual) of an antisemitic agenda or impact by reminding readers of the existence of the self-loathing, terror-sympathizing, rape-denying Jews who run the organization “Jewish Voice for Peace” — and also Jews who fought for Nazis, and the rich history of Jewish political figures who have attempted to distance themselves from their Jewishness for political benefit (and usually failed).
In 2021, which foreshadowed this shameful pit of antisemitism that Western liberal media has fallen into, hundreds of journalists from mainstream publications (including The New York Times) signed an open letter promising to deliver intentionally biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to ensure that “normalization” of the very existence of the Jewish state (and any of its actions to protect itself) ceases, and to effectively paint Israelis and Jews with any affinity for our homeland as barbaric, evil colonizers.1
That leads me to the last, but not least, of The New York Times’ comical mission and value statements: “Excellence: We aim to set the standard in everything we do. The pursuit of excellence takes different forms, but in every context, we strive to deliver the very best.”
For all their careful emphasis on words, it seems that The New York Times has neglected to choose the more appropriate term they are striving for in their endeavor to be and remain “the best”: “Supremacy” is the term I believe they are looking for. Specifically white supremacy — you know, the kind the Nazis they were so deeply sympathetic to once strove for.
Gentle reminder for The New York Times and every other entity championing (intentionally or unintentionally) the values of Nazis: They lost — everything, and quite miserably. And so will anyone and everyone else who aligns themselves with blistering Jew-hatred.
“An open letter on U.S. media coverage of Palestine.” Medium.
Also consider what the NYT decides to cover. Their laser focus on the war in Gaza, ignoring or giving minimal space to wars in other parts of the world, is another less obvious form hate.
The NYT has a long and sordid history of opposition to Zionism and traditional Judaism in addition to its whitewashing of Communism Nazism and ignoring of anti Semitism and the uniquely Jewish aspects of the Holocaust