The New York Times has long called itself the paper of record. Now its own shareholders want to see the record.
On September 23, the State Board of Administration of Florida, which manages the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund, joined the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) in suing The New York Times Company in New York County Supreme Court. The suit demands internal records that the Times has refused to hand over for four months, most of them tied to the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. At the heart of the case is a simple question: is anyone on the Times’ board making sure the paper follows the standards it publishes?
The Times’ answer was to call the suit “meritless” and “a clear attempt to chill First Amendment-protected journalism.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who represents the pension fund, rejected that framing. He said the state is not suing over a single article or over editorial judgment. It is suing over corporate governance, because a publicly traded company owes legal duties to its shareholders. By Uthmeier’s count, the Times admitted 72 errors in its own corrections column, in a single coverage area, over just eight months.
The shareholder demand letter that preceded the lawsuit put it bluntly: “A Board doing its job does not watch its company get caught, publicly and repeatedly, publishing material that violates the company’s own written standards, and say nothing.”
A Column the Times Would Not Walk Back
The effort began in May. On May 11, Nicholas Kristof, a longtime Times opinion columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, published “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” The column accused Israeli forces of sexually assaulting Palestinians, including two Palestinian “journalists.” According to the Washington Free Beacon, the most shocking allegation relied heavily on a Hamas-linked organization. The column has since been widely discredited, and the Free Beacon called it a “dog-rape libel.”
The Times did not retreat. On May 21, opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury said the paper stood by the column. On May 29, the National Jewish Advocacy Center sent the Times its first shareholder demand letter.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary fact-checking,” said Steve Milloy of NCPPR’s Free Enterprise Project. “The Times did the former but not the latter. This puts the company and investors at unnecessary risk.”
Fifteen Warnings
The lawsuit leans on the account of a Jewish former Times employee who worked on the paper’s video desk. Beginning in 2019, she raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at least 15 times, through her managers, the standards desk, and human resources. According to the filing, one HR representative told her that if she didn’t like the paper’s values, she should “go find a place whose values align with yours.” She left the Times in March 2026.
“The public deserves a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved,” she said.
Two Spouses, Two Standards
The shareholders also point to coverage that treated similar stories in opposite ways. On March 4, the Times reported on pro-Israel social media activity by Corinne Levy Goldman, wife of Rep. Dan Goldman, and framed it as potentially “hateful or insensitive.” Two days later, it covered posts by Rama Duwaji, wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, that celebrated Palestinian terrorists. The headline called them “Support for Palestinian Cause.” The lawyers noted that the paper “covered both spouses but at no point treated them alike.”
A similar pattern appeared in the Times’ June 4 investigation of Graham Platner, a Maine Senate candidate and fierce critic of Israel. The paper said it “could not corroborate” allegations from a former girlfriend, even though she pointed reporters to other women they never contacted. Days later, Politico reported that another woman, a Democrat, said Platner raped her, and his campaign collapsed. The shareholders also say the Times downplayed Platner’s Nazi tattoo.
A Pattern With Numbers Behind It
None of this is new. A year-long CAMERA study of the Times’ opinion pages found the paper was nearly seven times more likely to publish pieces primarily critical of Israel than pieces primarily critical of Palestinians. A new peer-reviewed study by Edieal Pinker of Yale School of Management examined 1,559 Times news articles published between October 7, 2023 and June 7, 2024. It found the paper consistently portrayed Palestinians as “passive victims” and Israel as the “sole aggressor.”
The Times wants this fight to be about press freedom. The shareholders want it to be about accountability. As their attorney Mark Goldfeder put it, they are not asking any court to review a headline or a source. They are asking who at the top of the Times checks whether its own rules are followed. For a paper that has spent decades holding others to account, that should not be a hard question to answer.
Sources
https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-york-times-faces-shareholder-lawsuit-over-alleged-anti-israel-bias
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/shareholders-sue-new-york-times-over-biased-israel-coverage-6093882
https://floridaphoenix.com/2026/09/23/florida-sues-ny-times-over-alleged-anti-israel-bias-demands-internal-records/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/4739399/new-york-times-shareholder-sue-newspaper-anti-israel-bias/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/new-york-times-sued-shareholders-anti-israel-bias-1236708966/
https://www.thefp.com/p/exclusive-shareholders-sue-new-york-times-biased-israel-reporting
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