New York Times Reader Comments Shows a Global Readership Shifting Against Israel

Ira Stoll

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The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In March 2022, the New York Times unveiled a global strategy that spoke of targeting “every curious, English-speaking person” and playing “an even bigger role in the lives of tens of millions of people around the world.” It didn’t speak of being a New York or American newspaper.

The paper was following through on an effort it announced in 2016 as “an ambitious plan to expand its international digital audience and increase revenue outside the United States.”

The Times reported then, “Just as The Times pushed beyond its local boundaries to become a national newspaper in the 1990s, the executives said in the memo that they now saw the “opportunity to become an indispensable leader in global news and opinion’ by expanding its presence outside the country’s borders.”

How far has the Times gotten toward achieving its objective of shifting its prototypical customer from a housewife in the Westchester County, New York, suburb of Scarsdale to some college professor in Berlin or bureaucrat in Brussels?

An indication is available in the reader comments on a Times news article headlined “Autopsies of Gaza Medics Killed by Israeli Troops Show Some Were Shot in the Head.”

Many of the Israel-bashing comments on the article come from readers based outside of the United States.

“There appears to be no law at all when it comes to Israel’s prosecution of war. No constraints. No real international pressure to try and contain these all too frequent violations,” writes a Times commenter identified as Richard Smith from Edinburgh, U.K. He called Israel’s behavior “sickening.”

Another Times commenter, Hélène Volat of Paris, writes, “each time I thought of having seen the worst, Israel surprises me.”

Another commenter, “Melan” from Berlin, writes to call for sanctions on Israel similar to those on Russia: “Freeze assets, ban travel, and block arms deals for officials behind the killings.”

A Times commenter Michelle from Montreal writes, “I will never buy anything made in Israel ever again.”

Times commenter “Steve” from Toronto writes, “I really wish the USA would stop supporting this country. Have you no morals?”

Another Times commenter, Denis Coakley from Ireland, contends, “Israel has descended to the level of Hamas… Sadly this is a result of the blank-cheque given to Netanyahu by his fellow tyrant in the White House.”

The Times staff is becoming increasingly international just as its readership is. The bylines on this story include those of Christoph Koettl, a graduate of the University of Vienna, according to his LinkedIn profile, who spent eight years as an employee of or consultant to the anti-Israel advocacy group Amnesty International and its affiliates; and of Bilal Shbair, who previously worked in Gaza as an English teacher for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Reporting was also contributed by “Abubakr Abdelbagi and Naziha Baassiri,” who don’t have biographies available on the New York Times website.

The Times article says the autopsies “were performed by Dr. Ahmad Dhair, the head of the Gazan health ministry’s forensic medicine unit,” without telling readers that the health ministry is controlled by the Hamas terrorist organization, or that Hamas restricts what reporters inside Gaza can report.

Having maxed out of anti-Israel readers on university campuses that provide enterprise-wide Times access to students, faculty, and staff, the Times is now trying to increase its revenues by chasing anti-Israel readers all the way to Europe and Canada. As a business growth strategy it may make some sense. The tradeoff, though, is turning the newspaper’s comments section into an anti-Israel sewer, and also allowing the news section of the paper to be used as a platform for stories that seem calculated to fuel anti-Israel animus. That comes at some cost to whatever is left of the Times’s fading credibility with whatever readers remain from the days when the Times was a New York newspaper, or a proudly American one.

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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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