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This morning, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 was headed from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 people aboard, nearly all Israeli, when the Omani co-pilot stabbed the Indian captain and tried to crash the plane. The aircraft dropped about 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds, and a hijack code was broadcast. Israel scrambled fighter jets. The wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door, and Israeli passengers rushed in and restrained the attacker. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu cited the stabbing and Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called it a “jihadist terror attack.”
But multiple outlets failed to clearly report these facts. BBC World reported, “Israel-bound flight diverted after fight between pilots.” The Washington Post reported the flight “was diverted to Saudi Arabia after a midair altercation prompted a hijacking distress signal,” but the article’s web address ends in “after-onboard-altercation,” revealing that was the original headline. CNN called it a “’violent’ altercation between two pilots,” and U.S. News/Reuters said “brawl.” For contrast, NBC ran “Pilot stabbed his co-pilot in apparent attempt to crash Israel-bound plane,” NPR ran “A pilot stabs another pilot and tries to crash their flight,” and CBS led with a passenger saying the “co-pilot tried to murder the pilot.”
The New York Times, in its breaking-news post, said only: “A plane flying from Dubai to Israel was diverted after an altercation between the pilot and co-pilot, Israeli officials said.” Its later coverage focused on the diversion and “the confrontation between the pilots.” When critics pushed back, NYT Communications posted: “Our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we’re able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don’t publish speculation or unverified information.”
I don’t have a problem with the initial reporting, given that the Times posted their first story at 6:08 a.m. ET and Netanyahu and Katz’s statements came out around mid-morning Eastern, so these details were not yet confirmed at the time of publication. My problem is more with the claim that “Unlike activists and partisans, we don’t publish speculation or unverified information,” as if we’re all a bunch of nitwits who have never heard of this thing called the Times before. As if the Times doesn’t do activism, just facts and data. So let’s review a few examples together.
1619
In 2019, the Times published a revisionist interpretation of American history that historians have attacked and even its own author and world-class mother, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has refused to defend, saying, “I’m a journalist, it’s a work of journalism.” As if that’s an excuse. The original 1619 Project famously, and falsely, asserted that protecting slavery was “one of the primary reasons” the colonists declared independence. Then in 2021, the paper partnered with the Pulitzer Center in launching the 1619 Project Education Network, explicitly designed to have educators “design, teach, and share curriculum” based on the Times project. Among other things, they produced a four-week high-school unit titled “Literacy and Liberation,” whose stated objectives include understanding “equity, power, and justice,” learning how literacy helps students act as “social change agents,” and empowering students “as activists in the present and in the future.” One of its assigned texts was Marxist philosopher Paulo Freire’s “The Importance of the Act of Reading.” A unit titled “Reparations Math and Reparations History” has students investigate reparations and use algebra to propose how the United States could pay them. Another has students become environmental-justice advocates. So, in their own words, they were literally training high schoolers to become Marxist “activists.”
Trans
In the 2018 article, “Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence,” the underlying story was that the government was considering a legal definition of sex as biological, binary, and generally immutable. The paper framed this as “defining transgender out of existence,” which is the woke activist language of erasure and trans genocide, and plainly an interpretive formulation rather than a neutral description of the proposed regulation. In other words, they were doing activist journalism. Another example is Julia Jacobs’s 2020 story about J.K. Rowling, which described parts of Rowling’s argument as “misinformation” and said there was “no evidence” that pro-trans bathroom policies increase assaults or privacy violations, but the story gave ample room to transgender and nonbinary voices repudiating Rowling, and almost none to the other side of the argument.
Gaza
The al-Ahli hospital explosion on Oct. 17, 2023, is the obvious centerpiece here. The initial Times homepage headline read: “Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says.” This foregrounded an Israeli airstrike and a death toll of 500 before either had been independently verified. Internal Times discussions later reported by Vanity Fair showed staff members had urged editors to hedge the claim. The Times eventually published an unusually candid editor’s note saying its early coverage had “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas.” Yes, Hamas. A second example came just two months later when the Times ran “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab War Losses in 40 Years.” Taken literally, that was obviously wrong — Syria, Iraq, and Yemen alone make the comparison untenable. The underlying article was actually making the much narrower claim that Gaza’s toll exceeded the Arab death toll in wars with Israel during that period. Then there’s the story “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace,” which compared Gaza’s reported women-and-children fatalities with civilian deaths in Ukraine, Iraq, and Afghanistan and concluded that the pace had few precedents in this century. The article acknowledged that Gaza authorities did not distinguish civilians from combatants, and women and children as an approximate proxy for civilian deaths. Or there’s the fact that Times columnist Megan Stack twice used a truncated quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant — “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” — omitting the sentence, “There will be no Hamas.” And when Netanyahu talked about getting rid of Hamas, Michelle Goldberg claimed he was talking about the “surrender and deportation” of all Gaza residents. This month, a peer-reviewed study by Yale professor Edieal Pinker analyzed 1,559 Times articles on the Israel-Gaza War and found 70% had an anti-Israel bias.
Confirmed
Let me be clear. I respect the Times. It’s still one of the most important news organizations in the world, and its reporters do work in war zones, in courtrooms, and inside government agencies that almost nobody else can match. I’ve helped run newsrooms, and I know every paper gets things wrong. Fine. But my complaint is that the Times’s errors all fall in the same direction, story after story, year after year, because they are not really errors. They’re the marks of a political bias. The staff at the Times is staggeringly, suffocatingly, absurdly progressive. But hey, having a point of view is not a sin. The Nation has one, as does National Review. The difference is, they admit it. And the Times won’t. Now it’s lecturing the rest of us that, “unlike activists and partisans,” it only deals in confirmed facts. Consider me unconvinced.
Is it really news that the Times is liberal? What's next ... a shocking exposé that the Wall Street Journal is conservative?
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