The Paper I Used to Trust

How “The Paper of Record” lost its way on Israel

When I was a law student in San Francisco in the late 1970s, I never imagined that over what became a 40-year journalism career, I would write eleven opinion pieces for The New York Times — ranging from Nazi war criminals to political assassinations to secret Vatican files to, most recently, the government’s failures after the Trump assassination attempt. It was during those law school years that I started a habit: when I needed a single reference point, the reporting in The New York Times was what I treated as determinative. The San Francisco Chronicle was the local competition, but the Times carried a different kind of authority. “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—its famous slogan, still tucked into the upper-left corner of the front page—did not seem like an empty boast.

When I moved to New York to practice law, and later as a journalist, that was how I worked for decades. The Times was one of my first stops for general news and analysis. It was not infallible, of course. No newspaper is. But if it printed something, I assumed it had survived layers of reporting and editing that gave it weight.

Which is why what has happened to the paper is so disappointing. As a contributor to the Times, I write this with no joy. But over that time I have watched it become increasingly partisan in its news coverage. And no topic has made its loss of balance clearer to me than its handling of Israel since October 7.

There is plenty of badly slanted Israel coverage—sometimes what feels like Israel derangement syndrome—at old-line news organizations including the BBC, Reuters, Sky News and The Washington Post. But the Times has been particularly galling. It was not, as is sometimes said, founded by Jewish owners: Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones founded the paper in 1851. But Adolph Ochs—a first generation American of Jewish immigrant parents—bought it in 1896, gave it its enduring slogan and built the modern institution that remains under the control of his descendants. That history makes the Times's present failure feel like a betrayal of its own legacy, not just an outside critic's complaint.

This week gave us a small, almost clinical example of a much larger problem.

Correspondent Isabel Kershner was reporting on NAZA, the wildly controversial Israeli film about IDF conduct in Gaza that received a 25-minute standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. In the original version of her story, Kershner wrote that Israelis “still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7.”

Not that they were victims. Instead, that they “view themselves” that way—as though there were another serious way to describe the people murdered, raped, wounded and kidnapped in the Hamas-led assault. Would the Times ever write that Americans “still largely view themselves as the victims” of 9/11?

After a furious online backlash, the Times removed the sentence and attached an Editors’ Note. It blamed “an editing error,” saying the language had been intended to convey Israeli perceptions of the government’s military response but had “inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception.”

I have written corrections in my career. I have had editors save me from my own inaccurate or clumsy phrasing. What I know from decades of reporting is that a sentence casting doubt on whether the roughly 1,200 people killed in Israel and 251 taken hostage on October 7 count as victims does not just materialize on the page. A reporter wrote it. Editors read it but it did not set off an alarm until readers outside the building made enough noise.

That is how a worldview leaks through an editing process.

Then there was Nicholas Kristof’s May 11 opinion column, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” I have written about its description of serious allegations of sexual abuse in Israeli detention, including the claim that dogs had been trained to rape Palestinian prisoners. That extraordinary claim was built largely on anecdotal, Hamas-adjacent sourcing that no other serious outlet had independently corroborated or agreed to publish.

The Times’s Opinion editors said the column had been fact-checked and that they found no errors. Executive editor Joe Kahn later said the news department “wouldn’t have done that exact piece,” while also expressing confidence that his Opinion colleagues had done their due diligence, a process he wasn’t part of. Kahn did not repudiate Kristof’s column but his distinction still exposed something readers are entitled to find troubling. A piece the news side would not have done appeared beneath the same New York Times banner, fortified by the same institutional authority.

Inside the building, News and Opinion may be separate countries. To the public, they share a flag. The paper had given its imprimatur to that flawed claim.

And news coverage is not rendered neutral merely because it appears outside the opinion pages. Reporters and editors put a finger on the scale through the sources they quote, the facts they foreground, the context they supply. Bias rarely announces itself but instead accumulates through a thousand defensible choices that all lean in the same direction.

I cannot say for certain that the Times has never issued a comparable correction running the other way—an error that cast Palestinians, rather than Israelis, in an unfairly harsh light. Large newspapers publish too much to make that absolute claim responsibly. What I can say is that I have looked for an example comparable to this one and have not found it. If a reader knows of one, I would genuinely like to see it.

The case is no longer merely anecdotal. It now has data behind it and the data needs to be described with some care.

Edieal Pinker, a professor of operations research at the Yale School of Management, analyzed 1,559 Times news articles published from October 7, 2023, through June 7, 2024. His paper was peer-reviewed and published in *Studies in Conflict & Terrorism*—an academic journal, not an advocacy website.

Pinker found that 1,423 of the 1,559 articles mentioned neither Israeli casualties after October 7 nor Hamas combatants killed in the ensuing war. “Israel” appeared 27,205 times, compared with 8,499 mentions of “Hamas.” Personal accounts of Palestinian or Lebanese suffering appeared, on average, two out of every three days, while there were nine stretches of at least a week with no mention of Israeli casualties after October 7. During one period, six Hezbollah rocket or anti-tank attacks that wounded Israeli civilians went unmentioned across 25 Times articles about fighting on the northern border.

Those are not merely impressions but countable editorial outcomes.

Pinker himself does not claim that his study proves bias or intent but rather that it documents imbalances that give readers an incomplete picture of the war.

The Times responded to Pinker’s newly published study by accusing advocates of “cherry-picking” data and pointing to its own body of work—more than 23,000 articles, photographs and videos since October 7, 2023. It said its reporting had exposed atrocities by Hamas as well as alleged violations of international law by Israel.

That is a defense of volume and range, not a rebuttal of Pinker’s method or findings. The 23,000 figure also covers a longer period and mixes articles with photos and videos, while Pinker studied 1,559 news articles from a defined eight-month window. The two numbers are not competing samples. Invoking the larger one may sound impressive, but it does not answer what Pinker measured inside the smaller one.

I want to be precise about what I am contending. I am not alleging a conspiracy, and I am not saying every Times reporter on this beat acts in bad faith. Still, the imbalance is documented. Whether one labels it “bias” depends partly on the baseline used and partly on a judgment about intent—something a word count cannot establish. My own judgment comes not from one table or one sentence, but from the way the numbers, editorial choices and recurrent lapses fit together.

Israel-Gaza is the sharpest example right now, but it is not the only one. I have seen on other subjects a similar tendency: reporting that lands consistently on one side of a contested question, then treats challenges to its framing as evidence of bad faith rather than legitimate pushback. Israel is simply the case where the evidence this month is hardest to wave away—and where the human stakes are highest.

My own disillusionment is part of a much larger collapse. In 1972, when Gallup began asking Americans whether they trusted the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, 68 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence. In Gallup’s 2025 survey, the figure was 28 percent—the first time it had fallen below 30. The Times did not cause that collapse by itself. But the country’s most influential newspaper cannot pretend to be merely a bystander to it.

I still read the Times. I also read and watch outlets on all sides of the political spectrum, from Al Jazeera to Fox News. I learn from the different ways they cover the same issue. The Times is different because it continues to trade on the authority of an institution that is supposed to do more than validate the worldview of its core audience.

“Paper of record” was never a hereditary title. It was a claim about earned trust. “All the news that’s fit to print,” is still on the masthead. The question is whether anyone still believes it.