New York Times sued by shareholders over alleged anti-Israel bias

The New York Times' parent company has been sued by a group of shareholders who say the paper has harbored a distinct anti-Israel bias in its reporting on the war in Gaza.

The Wednesday filing largely hinges on the account of an unnamed employee who is said to have raised concerns about compliance with editorial standards at least 15 times since 2019.

The complaints involved instances of purported antisemitism and bias against Israel, the suit claimed. The newsroom staffer brought them to various departments' attention, according to the petition.

The employee, however, was repeatedly rebuffed, the suit claimed.

'If you don’t like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours,' the employee was allegedly told by an HR representative, in one instance, according to the suit.

The lawsuit was filed by Florida's attorney general, James Uthmeier, in New York state court. He is representing the group of shareholders, who are demanding access to internal documents to potentially prove the Times flouted basic journalistic standards.

'When you’re a news agency, your credibility is everything,' Uthmeier said at a press conference Wednesday announcing the records request. 

A spokesperson for the Times, however, pushed back, framing the filing as an effort to bully the paper into reporting on Israel more favorably in a Thursday statement to the Daily Mail.

 Times dismisses lawsuit as ‘agenda-driven’ attack

'This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose.

'Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment.

'We will defend against the suit vigorously,' the spokesperson said.

One of the petitioners is the State Board of Administration of Florida, the group that oversees the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund, a holder of more than 160,000 shares of Times stock.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank, is the only other.

Both aired a belief that they’re entitled, as shareholders, to scrutinize the Times' books.

In addition to the whistleblower account, the suit is supported by a 2024 peer-reviewed study that found the Times admitted to 72 errors in its Israel-Hamas war coverage between October 2023 and June 2024. 

 Forty-eight of these errors involved Israel, the suit pointed out.

 Times accused of weak oversight after reporting errors

The Times also admitted the errors were identified by outside critics rather than by the company itself.

'Corrections were late, vague and sometimes evasive,' the suit claimed.

As it stands, the Times board lacks a sufficient mechanism for addressing internal complaints about standards, according to the petition.  

'The Company’s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions... supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company’s internal controls, but [that]... in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors,' one portion read.

'That inference is strengthened by what Petitioners’ investigation did not find: any Board-level committee, independent oversight function, or other objective third party charged with assessing whether the Company effectively enforces and complies with its own editorial standards.

'Put plainly, although the Company adopted certain internal journalistic controls (including controls against biased reporting and misreporting), Petitioners found no indication that the Board established any mechanism for information about compliance with those controls to reach the Board.

 'Making matters worse, numerous instances of gross violations of those controls were brought to the attention of Board members who double as Company executives, yet the Board seemingly refused to take any corrective or protective action.'