How pro-Israel bias took over the New York Times newsroom

To be the newspaper of record for the United States — still considered the de facto 'leader' of the free world — comes with a clear list of ethical responsibilities. 

"To give the news impartially, without fear or favour, regardless of party, sect or interests involved," is what the New York Times claims it adheres, according to an article published in 2020 as part of its 'Understanding the Times' series. 

Yet, an "exposé" published by the newspaper in late December 2023 has critics alleging that the Times threw its ethics code out of the window and likely reinvigorated the Israeli war effort at a time when even Israel's allies were expressing concerns over the high death toll of civilians in Gaza. 

The story in question, titled 'Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct 7,' is an investigative piece detailing sexual violence committed by Hamas during the raids. Co-bylined by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, the story has drawn internal criticism from staffers and led the Times to pull an episode of The Daily podcast on the original story, according to The Intercept. 

But it was the freelance reporter Anat Schwartz's social media activity that brought further scrutiny to the piece, after an X user found that she had liked various pro-Israel posts. 

The most alarming of her "likes", according to various American media outlets, was a post urging Israel to turn the Gaza Strip "into a slaughterhouse" and "violate any norm, on the way to victory."

The New York Times has always had a strict social media policy, which warns journalists not to "express partisan opinions, promote political views, endorse candidates, make offensive comments or do anything else that undercuts The Times's journalistic reputation." 

Although revelations of Schwartz's social media activity have prompted the Times to "review" her, many of the newspaper's current journalists (including a recent Pulitzer winner), former employees, and the larger journalism community say her story on Hamas' sexual violence requires more scrutiny.

According to The Intercept, which dug deep into how the NYT story made its way to the front page, found that a weak reporting process, editorial bias and newsroom leaders' intention to promote a predetermined narrative might have led to the justification of the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. 

What did the exposé expose?

The headline of the story makes a direct claim: Hamas used systematic sexual violence as a weapon of war when it attacked Israel on 7 October.

While Israeli authorities have opened an investigation into possible sexual crimes during the attack, Hamas denies the abuses.

So far, UN experts have said that mounting evidence of rapes and genital mutilation point to possible crimes against humanity on that day. "The growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence is particularly harrowing," two UN-appointed independent experts said in a statement in January.

In its mission report on the official visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank between 29 January and 14 February, the UN said that based on the examination of available information, including credible statements by eyewitnesses, there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of rape, including gang rape, occurred in and around the Nova festival site during the 7 October attacks. 

The UN also found "reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence" occurred on and around Road 232 and Kibbutz Re'im. At Kibbutz Kfar Aza, while "verification of sexual violence against these victims was not possible at this point, available circumstantial information – notably the recurring pattern of female victims found undressed, bound, and shot – indicates that sexual violence, including potential sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, may have occurred."

But the question is whether the Times was able to prove the claim of systematic sexual violence in its story.

The UN mission team conducted a visit to kibbutz Be'eri and was able to determine that at least two allegations of sexual violence widely repeated in the media, were unfounded due to either new superseding information or inconsistency in the facts gathered, according to the mission report.

"The question has never been whether individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred on 7 October. Rape is not uncommon in war, and there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day in a 'second wave,' contributing to and participating in the mayhem and violence," journalists Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw wrote in a report published by The Intercept on 28 February. 

"The central issue is whether the New York Times presented solid evidence to support its claim that there were newly reported details 'establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on 7 October' — a claim stated in the headline that Hamas deliberately deployed sexual violence as a weapon of war," they noted. 

To find evidence, the Times turned to Schwartz, an Israeli filmmaker and former air force — part of the  Israel Defense Forces (IDF) — intelligence official, who teamed up with freelance reporter Adam Sella and Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman.

As she had no prior reporting experience, Gettleman explained the basics to Schwartz, she said in a podcast interview with Israel's Channel 12 on 3 January. Several NYT newsroom sources familiar with the process told The Intercept that Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing.

In the newsroom, the story was allegedly met with praise from editorial leaders but scepticism from other journalists. 

New York Times' flagship podcast "The Daily" attempted to turn the article into an episode, but apparently, it did not manage to get through a fact check (though the newspaper has denied the allegation). 

After the report was published, the family of one victim emphasised the absence of evidence supporting the claim that she was raped, asserting that the newspaper's reporters had interviewed them under false pretences. The victim's sisters also refuted the allegations of rape.

Schwartz herself said in an interview that she felt conflicted at times, wondering if she was becoming convinced of the truth of the overarching story precisely because she was looking for evidence to support the claim. 

"I kept wondering all the time, whether if I just hear about rape and see rape and think about it, whether that's just because I'm leading toward that," she said in the podcast interview with Israel's Channel 12.

The independent site 'October 7 Fact Check,' Mondoweiss and journalists Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada and Max Blumenthal of The Grayzone have flagged numerous inconsistencies and contradictions in the stories told in the Times report.

Gettleman himself has refrained from using the term "evidence" for what they presented in the story. 

"What we found — I don't want to even use the word 'evidence,' because evidence is almost like a legal term that suggests you're trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court. That's not my role. We all have our roles. And my role is to document, to present information, to give people a voice. And we found information along the entire chain of violence, so of sexual violence," he said while speaking on a panel on 9 February about sexual violence at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

The New York Times did not respond to queries from this publication sent by email on March 4.  

Bias against Palestinians?

The New York Times has long been accused of anti-Palestinian bias, criticism that has ramped up in response to the paper's coverage of Israel's war on Gaza.

But its journalists do not all agree with this stance and have spoken out. 

Jazmine Hughes, for New York Times Magazine staff writer, was forced to resign in November for violating the paper's public protest policy by signing an open letter condemning Israel's genocide in Gaza. Later that month, Jamie Lauren Keiles, a contributor who self-identifies as a "religiously observant Jew," also signed the letter and said that he would no longer write for the publication.

Washington Post and Vanity Fair recently reported that the union representing New York Times employees is accusing the company of targeting employees with Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds in a weeks-long investigation into leaks from its newsroom regarding the paper's coverage of the 7 October attack.

The leak investigation, first reported by Vanity Fair, came in response to The Intercept's article in late January that said NYT had pulled an episode of its podcast.

Journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi, a contributor for the New York Times who won the Pulitzer in November, has also termed the newspaper's coverage of the war as biased.

Al-Jazeera also delved deep into the 28 December article in a recent episode of The Listening Post, revealing the controversies surrounding the article along with the broader issue of Western media outlets' pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinian bias. 

In 2003, a study in the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics concluded that The New York Times reporting was more favourable to Israelis than to Palestinians. 

A year before that study, a study published in the journal 'Journalism' examined Middle East coverage of the Second Intifada over one month in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. The study authors said that the Times was "the most slanted in a pro-Israeli direction" with a bias "reflected...in its use of headlines, photographs, graphics, sourcing practices, and lead paragraphs."

But the Times has been accused of such reporting as far back as the Russian Revolution in 1917. Back then, the newspaper two-time Pulitzer winner Walter Lippmann accused NYT of having referred to events that had not taken place, atrocities that did not exist, and that it reported no fewer than 91 times that the Bolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse.

The newspaper has also been criticised for downplaying the severity of the Holocaust. In the 2005 book 'Buried by the Times,' author Laurel Leff stated NYT buried in the back pages of the paper stories about the genocide of European Jews, and avoided mentions of Jewish victims of persecution, deportations and death camps. 

And then there was journalist Judith Miller's reporting on WMDs in Iraq. Gettleman, Schwartz and Sella's pieces are reminiscent of Miller's reporting before the invasion of Iraq. 

"The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper's Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbour animosity toward Palestinians, lack experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel's war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war," according to The Intercept. "Senior leadership at the New York Times did."

One frustrated Times reporter, who has also worked as an editor there, told The Intercept, "A lot of focus will understandably, rightfully, be directed at Schwartz but this is most clearly poor editorial decision-making that undermines all the other great work being tirelessly done across the paper — both related and completely unrelated to the war — that manages to challenge our readers and meet our standards."

As Daniel Okrent, the newspaper's Public Editor from 2003-05, had written of the Times' failure in verifying the WMD theory, "The failure was not individual, but institutional."