The newspaper’s long record of bias in its coverage of Israel and Jewish issues has worsened with an influx of young ‘woke’ reporters, experts say.
When a missile exploded near a Gaza hospital in October last year, the New York Times reported that hundreds had been killed in a blast caused by an Israeli missile that struck the hospital.
The Hamas terrorist group made all of those claims. None of them were true.
Western intelligence agencies over the next few days agreed with Israel that it was an off-course missile fired by Hamas or another terrorist group that exploded prematurely. The rocket hit a hospital parking lot where some people were gathered. And most reported the casualties as much lower.
The New York Times, regarded as the nation’s newspaper of record for nearly a century, backpedaled through numerous revisions and clarifications of the story over the following days and weeks. Those included an editor’s note about how they covered it and another editor’s note about the first editor’s note. But the newspaper never issued a clear retraction.
This doesn’t surprise those who track the newspaper closely. The New York Times has always had it in for the Jewish state, they say. The paper holds Israel to standards of proof it doesn’t require of, say, the Hamas terror organization running Gaza. The newspaper’s coverage implies, by its endless qualifications and hesitancies, that it doubts what Israel’s spokesmen and women say.
“What is the New York Times? It’s traditionally, of course, a liberal, left-of-center publication,” Alberto Fernandez told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Fernandez is vice president of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. The group translates and publishes press and media reports from the Middle East, valuable information as, the group maintains, what speakers say in their native tongues to their home audiences is often very different from what they say in English or generally for foreign consumption.
The New York Times’ core audience “has a certain type of mindset. Kind of well-educated, university-educated, professional types or student types have been for a long time the New York Times demographic,” Mr. Fernandez said.
