New York Times shareholders filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the paper’s parent company, demanding that its board hand over internal records concerning how it has handled topics including the Israel-Hamas war.
The State Board of Administration of Florida (SBA) and conservative nonprofit National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) filed the petition in New York County Supreme Court seeking to compel The New York Times Company to produce internal records showing how the board oversees editorial standards, fact-checking, corrections, source verification, defamation exposure and reputational risk, with the paper’s Gaza coverage being central to the shareholders’ concerns.
The petition claimed that The New York Times has had a recent history of “materially false or baseless factual assertions,” citing a peer-reviewed study published in 2024 which found that the Times admitted 72 errors in its Israel-Hamas war coverage between October 2023 and June 2024, with 48 of these errors about Israel, and that the “[c]orrections were late, vague and sometimes evasive.”
“The Company’s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company’s internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion that in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors,” the petition read.
NEW YORK TIMES LOSES DEFAMATION SUIT, ORDERED TO PAY $9.25M TO FORMER ALABAMA BASKETBALL PLAYER
“That inference is strengthened by what Petitioners’ investigation did not find: any Board-level committee, independent oversight function, or other objective third party charged with assessing whether the Company effectively enforces and complies with its own editorial standards,” the complaint continued.
“Put plainly, although the Company adopted certain internal journalistic controls (including controls against biased reporting and misreporting), Petitioners found no indication that the Board established any mechanism for information about compliance with those controls to reach the Board,” it added. “Making matters worse, numerous instances of gross violations of those controls were brought to the attention of Board members who double as Company executives, yet the Board seemingly refused to take any corrective or protective action.”
The petition cites a May 11, 2026, opinion column by Nicholas Kristof titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” whose sourcing and claims, the shareholders allege, were publicly criticized and “shown to be exaggerated, manipulated, and unsupported.”
The petition also claimed that the New York Times fostered an unwelcoming environment for differences of opinion, citing a whistleblower who raised concerns about anti-Israel bias in the paper’s reporting with Human Resources and was allegedly told, “If you don’t like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours.”
The New York Times has, according to the petition, rejected prior demands for the requested records, saying the demand “does not serve a proper purpose and violates the First Amendment” and that the petitioners’ concerns are “transparently pretextual and made in bad faith” as well as saying the demands “are improper on their face because they seek records of the day-to-day business and editorial judgments of The Times” and qualify as “coordinated harassment.”
A spokesperson for the Times dismissed the lawsuit in comments to Fox News Digital.
“This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose,” the paper said in a statement. “Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment. We will defend against the suit vigorously.”
Gerard Filitti, senior counsel with The Lawfare Project, a Jewish civil and human rights organization, described the case in more detail in comments to Fox News Digital.
“In May, The Lawfare Project sent the New York Times a seven-page retraction demand on the [Nicholas] Kristof column, documenting that the column’s primary source is chaired by a man on Israel’s list of Hamas operatives who called the October 7 attackers ‘heroic knights,’ and that its validating expert left UCLA amid sexual harassment allegations involving minors,” Filitti said.
“The Times’s deputy general counsel answered that he saw ‘no basis for a retraction or correction’ because the story ‘was carefully edited and fact-checked.’ Yet less than two months later, the paper’s executive editor said the newsroom ‘wouldn’t have done that exact piece,’” he continued. “Shortly after our demand, the paper’s own shareholders asked a narrower question – whether anyone above the editors checks that the Times follows its own written standards — and the Times refused to even provide them with the charters and standards handbook it already publishes.”
CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF MEDIA AND CULTURE
“The petition filed today puts the Times’s credibility in front of a judge, along with a record the paper has refused to answer anywhere else: 72 errors the paper admitted in eight months of war coverage, 48 of them about Israel; a front-page caption calling a Gaza child ‘born healthy’ that the paper walked back five days later; a columnist who quoted his own campaign donors in at least a dozen columns without telling readers; a 10-year Jewish employee told by Human Resources, according to the petition, to ‘go find a place whose values align with yours;’ and a federal jury that found the Times liable for defamation on August 20, the paper’s first loss at trial in more than fifty years,” Filitti added.
“This record comes from the Times’s own corrections column, its own personnel, and a jury, and it is now a court filing in New York County,” he continued. “For the first time, the Times has to give an answer — in sworn papers, to a judge, on a public docket. The likely response, from a paper that sells credibility for a living, is that its own shareholders may not ask how it protects that credibility. The petition is a first step toward accountability, and a larger one toward public recognition that the problem is systemic.”
