Meet the reputable sounding ‘Pulitzer Center’
The New York Times is doubling down on its demonize-Israel editorial strategy, offering up its news columns to a project funded by far-left foundations and foreign governments that, in more than 6,000 words, lumps together all the lurid tropes about Israel and Jews—starving Gazans, bombing hospitals, killing children, profiteering, and destroying Arab villages in 1948.
The piece was published online Monday June 8, 2026, after a weekend during which the Times website homepage featured a package of headlines that included, “Pentagon Sees Growing Espionage Threat from Israel,” “Israeli Strike Kills 3 Lebanese Soldiers, Days After Truce Was Signed,” and “Infant Killed as Israeli Military Fires on Car in West Bank, Palestinian Officials Say.” It comes less than a month after an article by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose father fought on the Nazi side in World War II, echoed Hamas propaganda in claiming that Israel had trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners as part of a pattern of systematic sexual violence. And it came as the Times also published a “visual investigations” article on Saturday by a former freelance contributor to Qatar-owned Hamas-cover-providing outlet Al Jazeera, Sanjana Varghese, who came to the Times from Airwars, a British nonprofit funded by far-left anti-Israel foundations and foreign governments. That article claims Israel is violating international law by using white phosphorus over civilian areas of Lebanon.
The Times is a large and somewhat decentralized operation. Yet the the net overall impression left for readers is that rather than retreating or pausing after the Kristof dog-rape article, which generated a legal threat from Prime Minister Netanyahu and a formal condemnation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Times is pushing ahead with similar content. I have chronicled how disproportional the paper’s coverage of Israel and Gaza is to the rest of the world, and the slant of those news reports is consistently hostile to Israel. That feeds the appetite of the Times’s paying customer base—far-left Americans and what the Times says are its more than 3 million digital subscribers outside the U.S.—about 26 percent of the total.
The news business has been financially challenging in recent years, so in addition to diversifying into word games and a recipe app, the New York Times has taken to schnorring from charities to support news and editorial content. That leaves more profits available for distribution in dividends to dozens of Ochs-Sulzberger heirs, but it also leaves Times readers slogging through content that might not have cleared the hurdle for publication or justified the editorial resources without the donor subsidy.
The 6,000 word Times project discloses online in faint or small type, “This project was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center” and “This project was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center.” Nowhere does the Times say what the Pulitzer Center is or who funds it. Because it has the word “Pulitzer” in it, it appears vaguely reputable, like the similarly named Columbia University-affiliated journalism awards that used to honor journalistic and literary excellence before they were hijacked by anti-Israel activists intent on piling prizes on pieces and pictures that advance the anti-Israel narrative. Yet the Pulitzer Center is a far-left nonprofit whose other activities include “The 1619 Project Curriculum,” aimed at bringing into classrooms the New York Times effort “to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date.” Its funders include left-leaning foundations such as the left-wing tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s wife Pam Omidyar’s “Humanity United,” which put in $200,000 in 2024, and George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave a three-year, $900,000 grant in 2023. The Pulitzer Center also gets money from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.
The Times article also relies on “a forthcoming report from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative nonprofit based in Amsterdam.” That group gets funding from, among others, the governments of the U.K., France, and Sweden, from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, an anti-Israel group. The Times doesn’t disclose that to readers, either.
The funding might be less of a concern if the journalism were less tendentious. Yet under the headline “The Cost of Survival in Gaza,” the Times breathlessly writes up the not-exactly-earth-shattering news that some guy in London has sent his relatives in Gaza “more than $250,000” to help them. It’s fairly common for better-situated relatives to help out other relatives facing challenges. Plenty of Americans have sent money to help their Israeli Jewish relatives facing Iranian missile attacks, temporary dislocations, and business and domestic disruptions related to extended reserve duty or wartime casualties. And U.S.-based workers and immigrants send remittances to relatives facing war or natural-disaster-related suffering in the Caribbean and Latin America, too.
Yet for the Times it’s all-Gaza, all-the-time, with the exception being occasional breaks for Trump-bashing and to amplify alleged Israeli-Jew-inflicted suffering in Lebanon and among Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria. The Times project, by Emma Goldberg and Emily Kassie, could have used an editor to give it some focus. What’s the news—the failures of Gaza humanitarian aid, the Israeli attacks on hospitals that were used as terrorist bases, the civilian casualties, what happened in the war of 1948? The Times article lumps them all together, consistently painting Israeli Jews in the worst possible light and the Gazan Arabs in the best possible light.
The double standards are staggering. The Times describes the London-based Arab as wanting to help his relatives leave Gaza: “More than anything, Saleh was focused on figuring out how to help his family escape … the border didn’t reopen, and Hala halted its evacuation business.” Not mentioned by the Times was the plan by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for voluntary relocation of Palestinians from Gaza to make way for a “Riviera of the Middle East.” When Trump proposed it, the Times news columns condemned it as “a violation of international law” that “would surely require many thousands of U.S. troops and possibly trigger more violent conflict.” When it’s an Arab in London trying to get Gazans out of Gaza, the Times finds it sympathetic. When Trump or Netanyahu embrace the idea, it becomes “outrageous — and not at all presidential.”
One could go on with a point-by-point refutation. Hamas was using the hospitals as headquarters. The “starving” Gazans were suffering from other underlying conditions and Hamas was looting the aid. The Arab suffering is largely collateral wartime damage or self-inflicted, not the malice depicted. The profit motive creates incentives that efficiently allocate scarce resources. Yet at a certain point the point-by-point rebuttals approach diminishing returns, and the New York Times just becomes one more thing that you can safely skip reading altogether. Instead of reporting on the situation it’s contributing to the problem.
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