Mick Hartley

This was the top of the New York Times last night. The first thing every reader sees the moment they land on the homepage of the most influential news outlet on earth. All three stories about Israel.

There is a famous communications scholar named Maxwell McCombs who developed… pic.twitter.com/GNEbEezZGW

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 7, 2026

There is a famous communications scholar named Maxwell McCombs who developed what is now called the “agenda setting theory.”

His core finding is simple: The press is not very good at telling people what to think. It is extraordinarily good, however, at telling people what to think ABOUT.

And what the New York Times has decided you should think about, every single day, multiple times a day, forever and always, is Israel.

You cannot saturate the most influential newsroom in the English language with relentless coverage of one small country and then act surprised when the public becomes similarly hyper-fixated with it.

The animosity we constantly see is the predictable output of editorial selection, repeated daily, until it becomes the background music of how people think about the Jewish state.