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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?
Then, of course, there was Nicholas Kristof’s extraordinary and outrageous claim that Palestinian prisoners were being raped by specially trained dogs.
Anyway…
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.
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