Lawyers press for disclosure of records, citing ‘sustained editorial failure’
A month after lawyers complaining about Nicholas Kristof’s “dog rape” fantasy sent a letter demanding to inspect New York Times Company board records and warning that “sustained editorial failure” could cause the Times to become “a newspaper the public comes to regard as a propaganda operation,” the Times has published two additional corrections acknowledging editing errors on Israel-related news.
The first of the two has to do with the size of bombs that the U.S. is supplying to Israel. “Corrected on Sept. 15, 2026: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified the size of the bombs that have caused widespread civilian harm in Gaza. They are 2,000 pounds, not 40,000 pounds,” the article now reads.
The second concerns a line that, while technically accurate, infuriated a lot of Times readers who were vocal in their dismay about it. That article now carries this appendage: “Editors’ Note: Sept. 16, 2026 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article included a statement that was intended to convey Israelis’ perception of the government’s military response to the Oct. 7 terror attack in relation to the attacks, but inadvertently suggested that Israelis’ experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. It has been removed from the article.”
A social media post by Eitan Fischberger highlighting the original line—”But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7,” with Fischberger’s comment, “What the f**k is this, @nytimes”—had 1.5 million impressions on X, highlighting the way that the X platform has helped to level the playing field between the legacy or “mainstream” media outlets such as the Times and individuals such as Fischberger.
Fischberger is the grandson of Rabbi Avi Weiss, a heroic grassroots activist on behalf of Soviet Jewry and other causes and the founding rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx. Fischberger, who is based in Israel and called Weiss his mentor, inspiration, and role model, told the Washington Free Beacon, “Apparently the Times needed a viral backlash to be reminded that the victims of a terrorist massacre are, in fact, victims.”
“The bigger lesson is that social media can be an extraordinary force multiplier for accountability. It can take something the Times might otherwise have gotten away with, and turn it into something the paper can no longer ignore,” Fischberger said, though he noted it “only works if the public refuses to grow numb or shrug this stuff off as the status quo.”
Other journalists also weighed in and amplified the controversy, including Fox News Channel’s chief political analyst, Brit Hume, and a CNN commentator, Scott Jennings, who called it an “abomination.”
Jewish organizations and Israeli government officials had also criticized the line in the Times article. The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, posted a screenshot of the Times article with the sentence highlighted and the comment, “Let’s get one thing straight. Israelis don’t ‘view themselves’ as victims of 10/7. They ARE the victims of the Hamas-led 10/7 massacre. Over 1,200 innocent people were murdered. Over 250 people were taken hostage, including children and Holocaust survivors. People were slaughtered, raped, abused, burned alive, their bodies desecrated – and all of this was proudly livestreamed by gleeful terrorists for the world to see. The entire nation of Israel continues to live with those scars. That’s not a matter of perspective. That’s just fact.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, of which I am a board member, also weighed in.
“Americans still view themselves as the victims of 9/11,” Israel’s minister of diaspora and combating antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, commented wryly.
“You can’t hate the NYT enough,” said a money manager and philanthropist, Clifford Asness.
A Times spokesman didn’t respond to a query about who the editors were who made the mistakes and whether there’d be any corrective action aimed at improving the system to make such errors less likely to occur. The mistakes are likely to support the narrative in the National Jewish Advocacy Center’s demand for inspection of books and records, which asks whether the Times Company’s board “has abdicated its basic oversight duties” and cites a “pattern extends well beyond any one subject.”
“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,” the letter says. The Times Company board includes some members who appear to be chosen not for their professional experience or qualifications but because they are members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family. That family inherited control of the paper via a family trust with a special class of stock; those shares have control rights that go beyond those of non-family shareholders who acquire shares by purchasing them rather than inheriting them.
For now the backstop is ordinary readers like Fischberger. He told the Free Beacon, “When a major institution publishes something grotesque, sometimes you really do need to just point right at it and ask, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Make them face it. Make them answer for it.”
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