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 Companys 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 Companys 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.
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“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.Â
“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, 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 citing a whistleblower who raised concerns about anti-Israel bias in the paper’s reporting with Human Resources and was allegedly told, “If you dont like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours.”
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