Jonathan S. Tobin
Algemeiner, June 3, 2022
“This reflects not so much a sea change in journalism as it does the culture in which journalists operate.”
For one of The New York Times’ most devoted readers, the front-page spread published on May 28 essentially accusing Israel of murdering Palestinian children was the final straw. Former Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman tweeted that day that he was canceling his subscription. He wrote that he “grew up in America on the NYT” as an immigrant child and learned “civics-democracy and all the news ‘fit to print’ for 65 years but no more.” As he put it, “today’s blood libel of Israel and the Jewish people on the front page is enough.”
But to many other critics of the paper, Foxman was late to the party. That’s why many of the responses to his comments were along the lines of what took him so long to realize that the publication that considers itself the country’s paper of record has been slanting its news stories against Israel long before the recent fighting with Hamas.
The paper, which has been owned by a family with Jewish origins since the 19th century, has been resolutely anti-Zionist since long before the modern-day State of Israel was established 73 years ago. Any discussion of the Times’ complicated history of Israel coverage and antisemitism inevitably includes the way it buried news of the Holocaust while it was happening. And then once Israel survived the Arab world’s first attempts to snuff out its life and began to be portrayed as the Jewish “Goliath” oppressing the Palestinian “David,” the Times became a source of unfair, out-of-context reporting about the conflict.
From the 1982 Lebanon War through the terrorism of the First Intifada—and then even bloodier Second Intifada that began in 2000—intermixed with periodic bouts of fighting with the Hamas terrorist organization that has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007, the Times’ treatment of Israel has been consistently unfair to Israel. At the same time, it often paints the Palestinians as hapless victims rather than ideological antagonists who are still determined to destroy one Jewish state on the planet, as opposed to living in peace alongside it.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
To view the original article, click here
