New York Times faces shareholder lawsuit over alleged anti-Israel bias

New York Times shareholders filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the paper's parent company, demanding that its board hand over internal records concerning how it has handled topics including the Israel-Hamas war.

The State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and conservative nonprofit National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) filed the petition in New York County Supreme Court seeking to compel The New York Times Company to produce internal records showing how the board oversees editorial standards, fact-checking, corrections, source verification, defamation exposure and reputational risk, with the paper's Gaza coverage being central to the shareholders’ concerns.

The petition claimed that The New York Times has had a recent history of "materially false or baseless factual assertions," citing a peer-reviewed study published in 2024 which found that the Times admitted 72 errors in its Israel-Hamas war coverage between October 2023 and June 2024, with 48 of these errors about Israel, and that the "[c]orrections were late, vague and sometimes evasive." "The Company’s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company’s internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion 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," the petition read.

NEW YORK TIMES LOSES DEFAMATION SUIT, ORDERED TO PAY $9.25M TO FORMER ALABAMA BASKETBALL PLAYER "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," the complaint continued.

"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," it added.