‘Just Canceled My Subscription,’ ‘Disgusting’: Readers Revolt at New York Times War Coverage

Ira Stoll

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The New York Times has greeted the Hamas terrorist onslaught against Israel that killed more than 1,000 with a thermometer-like chart depicting a competition between “Israeli and Palestinian conflict-related deaths,” as if Israeli children and grandmothers murdered in cold blood were somehow morally equivalent to Israel’s self-defense killings of terrorists.

One former New York Times columnist, Max Fisher, celebrated the appearance of the game-show style graphic on the newspaper’s website home page. “A sign of how much US popular and journalistic attitudes have changed,” Fisher posted on X/Twitter. “I did this exact chart at Vox during the 2014 war and got screamed at for weeks. David Frum accused me of agitating for murder of Jews. Ted Cruz condemned. Now it’s on the NYT HP without a blip.”

Not entirely without a blip. One Times reader, David Rusenko, posted, “Just canceled my @nytimes subscription. Shockingly biased coverage on the front page right now. All photos of damage or injury are Palestinian, and photos representing Israel are of tanks, the iron dome, and people hiding safely.”

Rusenko went on: “Zero mention of the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Israeli civilians and the gleeful filming as their bodies are paraded around the streets. And to add insult to injury, they have the gall of featuring a graph of the relative deaths from the last 15 years, implying that either the attack was justified or minimizing the current deaths. Disgusting.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) hasn’t left the Times off the hook. Cruz retweeted radio host Mark Levin’s cautionary words: “Watch the New York Times, which covered up the Holocaust while millions of Jews were being exterminated. Watch how it turns on the Israeli Jews as Israel acts to wipe out Hamas. Watch how most of the rest of the media line up behind it.”

The senator also warned, “Hamas uses civilians as human shields. When Israel strikes back, the useful idiots at the New York Times and CNN will denounce Israel for murdering civilians. Don’t believe the lies.”

At least in the initial coverage, the Times‘ main errors have been more of moral equivalence than outright denouncing Israel. But there was some of the latter, too.

A Times staff editorial denounced Israel for cutting off electricity to Hamas-controlled Gaza and lectured Israel about international law. “Already the Israeli government is cutting off power and water to Gaza, and it ordered a siege to starve Hamas of resources. This tactic, if it continues, will be an act of collective punishment,” the Times editorial said. “All sides involved in the conflict are bound by international law, and it is important to note that violations by one side do not permit violations by another.”

The same editorial concluded with a call to “work toward an end to the cycle of violence.”

The idea of a “cycle of violence” doesn’t accurately apply to the situation in Israel. Everyone outside the Times realizes that, from the left-of-center Israel Policy Forum (“There Is No Cycle of Violence“) to the right-of-center Middle East Forum (“cycle of violence … implies a moral equivalence between the killing of Israeli civilians and Palestinian Arab terrorists. It confuses the arsonist with the fire department.”).

Times readers complained online about an imbalance, with the Times highlighting more pictures of suffering Palestinians than of suffering Israelis. “The NYT coverage is an absolute travesty. I’m embarrassed that it took me this long to cancel my subscription. I only wish I could cancel it multiple times,” Justin Reidy posted.

Other readers took to social media to complain, too.

Yuri Sagalov wrote: “NYT has 16 photos on the home page attached to this article. Scroll through them. 11 of them are of the action in Gaza. Of the 5 about Israel, one shows a dog that was rescued. None show or even *hint* at the gruesomeness of the civilian murders of the past 24-48 hours.”

The Israeli government has openly struggled with decisions about releasing gruesome photos of suffering Israelis, apparently balancing the risk that they might be seen as disrespectful or demoralizing with the need to accurately portray the horrors of what happened. Hamas, on the other hand, has enthusiastically promoted images of Palestinian suffering as a kind of cause-advancing publicity of supposed Israeli brutality.

“So disgusted with @nytimes coverage of the terror in Israel that I am giving up Wordle. It means nothing to them but I won’t support them in any way,” said one, drawing a reply of: “Agree. NYT coverage sucks. I’m going elsewhere for my news. WTF was going on earlier today where the photos on the landing page were 80% of the damage in Gaza and 20% of the damage in Israel?”

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Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

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