What happened? Did someone in the New York Times news division feel unsafe over another op-ed? The last civil war at the Times happened in 2020, when the entire staff threatened to walk off the job unless the Paper of Wreckard renounced Tom Cotton and denounced op-ed chief Bennet, forcing management to appease the reporters by throwing Bennet out of his job.
This time, though, the reporters have a legitimate beef, and it's not about feeling unsafe. It's about Nick Kristof's regurgitation of claims from terrorists that its news division refuses to report, and no one's happy about it. Dylan Byers reported at Puck on Friday that the anger bubbling up in the news division has reached "civil war" levels, which the New York Post picked up today. The catalyst is Israel's threatened lawsuit, but the kindling has been the blasts from critics over Kristof's absurd claims:
Nick Kristof’s radioactive Opinion piece—a lengthy exposé alleging that Israeli prison guards had engaged in depraved and systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians—set in motion a series of high-pitched events. Pro-Israel advocates immediately accused the paper of antisemitism. Incredulous editorials in The Wall Street Journal and The Free Press followed. On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu threatened to sue the Times for libel against the State of Israel. Whether it is actually possible for a nation to bring a libel case against a foreign newspaper is not the concern of this column; suffice to say that the threat itself achieved the desired conflagratory effect.
The Times is standing by its star columnist, and has issued several public statements asserting that the column, supported by numerous on-the-record victim accounts and independent human rights reports, was rigorously and meticulously fact-checked. In private conversations, the paper’s upper echelons stress that Nick is a two-time Pulitzer winner with a reporter’s DNA, and attest to a rigorous editing process and a lack of factual errors.
Nevertheless, many Times journalists told me they remain suspicious of Nick’s sourcing for the most incendiary allegations, skeptical that those sources would have cleared the standards of the newsroom rather than Opinion, and mildly miffed at the Pulitzer-eager columnist for bringing scrutiny on the paper in a piece that should have been in their jurisdiction. Above all else, many seemed exasperated by what they viewed as another instance of the Times brand being undercut by the actions of another department that, they feel, is not held to the same standards. Said one, “I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section.”
Imagine how their readers feel!
The New York Post report doesn't add much to Byers' reporting, but it also had a conflagatory effect, so to speak. Puck exists primarily as an insider's look at the news and entertainment industries, and almost all of its content is paywalled. The NYP popped that hedgerow and laid it out for its mass audience, which had the intended effect of raising "civil war" prospects at the Gray Lady of the Hamas Night.
Interestingly, even while making the issue of news practices the focus of the ire at the NYT, Byers doesn't spend a lot of time discussing where Kristof actually fell short. Over the weekend, No Labels founder Nancy Jacobson drilled down into Kristof's journalistic malpractice that has reporters seeing red:
Let’s start with Kristof’s marquee source: the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He calls it “a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel,” which is like calling the DNC “a Washington-based political group often critical of Republicans.” Euro-Med exists to oppose Israel. Many of its leaders, including its founder and chairman, are linked to Hamas. The group has a track record of promoting unverified or false anti-Israel claims, including the exact “dogs trained to rape prisoners” story Kristof repeated.
As for that preposterous claim, it is a well-documented libel against Israel.
And then there is the rampant use of anonymous sourcing, which makes up most of the first-person accounts in Kristof’s piece. Assuming these sources are real Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, they have an obvious incentive to paint Israelis in the worst possible light. Basic journalistic due diligence would have treated the claims with skepticism, especially when they offer no medical reports, photos, videos, or forensic evidence for the most extreme claims.
When Kristof does quote sources on the record, their identities are revealing.
Judge Roy K. Altman picks up this thread, among others, in his lengthy analysis at The Free Press:
Kristof justifies his reliance on anonymity by suggesting that his sources would face retribution, either from Israeli authorities or from their own communities, if they came forward. But there are at least four major problems with this excuse.
One, Kristof provides no evidence of any similar retribution against one of the men he spoke with who has publicly accused Israeli guards of sexual assault. For months now, Sami Al-Sai has repeatedly and publicly claimed, including to major news outlets like NPR and the Times, that he was sexually assaulted while in Israeli detention. There are real problems with Al-Sai’s claims. For one thing, soon after his detention, he filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court, arguing that he was wrongly detained and asking for his immediate release. In that petition, he complained about the quality of the food he was given and said that he was treated badly, but he notably never mentioned any of the sex allegations he’s now advancing. ...
Three, Kristof’s reliance on anonymity ensures that no one—most especially the Israelis—can ever prove him wrong. That’s because he not only tells us very little about the accusers, he tells us nothing about the offenses. No locations. No dates. No perpetrators. Israeli prisons, like many of our own, are often videotaped, and those recordings are reviewed not just by prison guards but by prison officials and lawyers. If Kristof had conducted anything resembling a fair analysis, we would have expected him to have asked to review some of this footage. But there’s no indication that he ever did. Nor can anyone else do so now because Kristof gave us no details to check against his claims. There’s an old adage that says it’s impossible to prove a negative—all the more so when there are no facts to investigate.
Read all of both essays to get a sense of why news-desk journalists might recognize the manner in which Kristof short-circuited responsible journalism. These are not rookie mistakes, either. Kristof knows the system and the safeguards well enough; he chose to evade them to tell the story his sources wanted to amplify. One could consider him a dupe, but that's too much benefit of the doubt for the "TO-TIME PULITZER AWARD WINNING OPINION JOURNALIST!!1!1!!" They know he cooked it ... which is why the news reporters won't print a corroborating news report, even while the Paper of Wreckard continues to insist that all is well.
Will this lead to a "civil war" at the NYT? Of course not – it's not like the paper did the unthinkable and platformed a Republican Senator, or something equally egregious. The reporters are merely embarrassed by the paper's own columnist's decision to turn their platform into an amplifier for a Jew-hating terror network, which is far less onerous in the cocktail circles and the Slack channels of the Gray Lady. And even that embarrassment is a result of Kristof exposing the New York Times for what it is, rather than making it look like something it actually isn't.
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