The New York Times is facing a reckoning in court.
A big-money institutional shareholder filed an explosive suit against The New York Times on Wednesday, demanding a look at the paper’s internal books to see if newsroom standards are being enforced or if the paper has completely surrendered to anti-Israel bias.
The State Board of Administration of Florida and the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research took the Times into New York County Supreme Court after four months of the paper stonewalling their requests, The Free Press reported. The suit claims the paper repeatedly told its own investors to get lost, calling their demands “pretextual” and arguing that peeking behind the curtain would “chill” protected journalism.
Even when shareholders narrowed their demands to board agendas, committee charters, and basic newsroom rules, the Times slammed the door on them.
Now, investors are calling the paper out, pointing directly to the Times’ own corporate SEC filings. Those documents clearly state that the Times’ credibility is its chief business asset and warn that if the public perceives biased reporting, the bottom line will be affected.
“Shareholders are entitled to see whether the board was watching at all,” declared David Benger, an attorney representing the National Jewish Advocacy Center, which is part of the plaintiffs’ legal team.
The lawsuit drops damning testimony from a veteran Jewish employee who spent nearly a decade on the Times’ video desk before walking away in March 2026. According to court papers, she blew the whistle to managers, HR, and ethics tip lines at least 15 separate times about rampant anti-Israel bias but was ignored.
The employee revealed that in the wake of Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, video staff frantically hunted for ways to prove Hamas wasn’t using tunnels beneath al-Shifa Hospital. One supervisor labeled them “alleged tunnels” even after Israel published footage of the underground terror network.
The suit also details the case of a freelance video journalist, Soliman Hijjy, whom the Times stopped using in 2022 after social media posts praising Hitler surfaced — only for the Times to rehire him within days of October 7, 2023. His byline was only scrubbed after an outside watchdog caught it red-handed, and he kept on contributing.
She said she was given the brush-off by the human resources department, which suggested she find a job “whose values aligned” with hers, while her boss snapped that checking into problems wasn’t her job.
The lawsuit also takes aim at a viral July 2025 photo published by the Times showing an emaciated Gazan toddler, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, under a caption saying his mother reported he was “born healthy.” Four days later, the paper quietly issued an editors’ note admitting the boy had severe pre-existing genetic conditions. Wire photos explicitly detailed his congenital illnesses, but Times standards editors greenlit the misleading narrative anyway.
A bombshell September study by Prof. Edieal Pinker of the Yale School of Management, published in the journal “Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,” showed numerous instances of imbalances in the Times’ coverage of Israel.
Pinker and his team meticulously analyzed 1,559 Times news reports published between October 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024. Nearly 70% of the 969 relevant articles framed Israel as the exclusive bad actor. Fewer than half even mentioned the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Despite 364 IDF soldiers and 31 Israeli civilians dying in the period studied, a staggering 89% of ground-coverage articles never mentioned post-October 7 Israeli military casualties. Readers went weeks at a time without a single mention of fallen Israeli soldiers.
Personal stories of Palestinian suffering ran roughly two out of every three days. Meanwhile, coverage of Israeli hardship post-October 7 appeared in under 4% of ground reports. The word “Israel” appeared 27,205 times across the study; “Hamas” showed up just 8,499 times. Only 18% of reports mentioned ongoing Palestinian violence, and just 10% noted Hamas fighter casualties.
The Times has yet to comment on the suit, but told media outlets in 2025, after Pinker released his findings, that it has covered the conflict with “more rigor” than virtually anyone else and dismissed claims of institutional bias.
Now, a judge will decide if the paper has to hand over its internal secrets to the very people who own it.
