I refer often to corporate media as systemically corrupt. This from Britain decides! in May 2021:
Media barons like Murdoch, Rothermere and Barclay Brothers are the visible tip of an iceberg. More insidious – less obvious hence more toxic – is the 200 year old business model of media dependency on advertising. As Noam Chomsky put it:
Media are large corporations selling privileged audiences to other large corporations. Now the question is: what pictures of the world would a rational person expect from this set up?
On matters of real import to our rulers – think Assange, Corbyn, Putin and Xi – media not owned by oligarchs do vital service. The liberal intelligentsia would never have bought the character assassinations of Assange or Corbyn from the Mail, Sun or Telegraph, yet lapped up the vilest trashings of both men in the Guardian.
Liberal ‘quality’ media play a distinct role. Increasingly reliant on super rich sponsors like Bill Gates and George Soros (advertising revenues having failed to transfer from print to web in the volumes initially projected) theirs is a balancing act. Yes, they must signal independence even at cost of embarrassing or pressurising high office widely mistaken for power. 1 Not only does long term ability to shape opinion by filtering reality, as implied by Chomsky’s question, rely on this. So too, on pain of losing market share, do their business models. But the trust so gained serves to mislead us, more by omission than commission, on matters critical – above all the vilifying of those in the way of empire designs – to the interests they ultimately serve …
… even when such disinformation, in this case of commission rather than omission, makes them a party to genocide. 2
Why writers must boycott the New York Times
October 8, 2025
The New York Times is the paper of record and has played a key role in enabling the Gaza genocide. To hold the newspaper accountable, we must sever our ties —not only as subscribers or advertisers, but also as writers who lend the paper legitimacy.
In light of the current phase of ceasefire in Gaza — itself a misnomer given the many hundreds of Palestinians martyred since its formalization — it is all the more important for those of us in the West to make sure institutions complicit in the genocide in Gaza cannot evade accountability for their actions. Such a holistic program of accountability, which includes countering denialism and the isolation of perpetrators, is not just an ethical obligation but a strategy for combating a culture of impunity that directly enables the Israeli state in its occupation and depopulation campaigns in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. A key enabler of the Zionist genocide is The New York Times. Hossam Shabat, one of at least 276 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel for exposing its crimes, put it best: “A reason we are still being bombed… is because of The New York Times and most Western media… The New York Times is complicit in this genocide.”
The so-called “paper of record” played a critical role in manufacturing consent for this genocide. Its coverage erased Palestinian resistance to decades of occupation and siege, legimitated a debunked myth of systematic sexual violence on October 7th, sowed uncertainty around the Israeli military’s targeting of hospitals, bent syntax to avoid ascribing culpability for targeted assassinations, and helped establish the conditions for famine by undermining the Palestinian aid organization UNWRA and downplaying Israel’s continued siege of Gaza. Post-ceasefire, the paper is rushing to try to rehabilitate Israel’s image, just as it did back in 1982.
The Sabra and Shatila massacre damaged Israel’s reputation in the West much in the same way the intensified genocide of the last two years has. Israel slaughtered thousands of children and civilians in the Shatila refugee camp and the surrounding Sabra neighborhood of Beirut. The massacre threatened to break the Zionist narrative’s stronghold and expose Israel’s project of elimination. In its aftermath, Ronald Reagan called Sabra and Shatila “a holocaust” in a phone call with Menachem Begin, and demanded Israel end its campaign, echoing what Palestinians and Arabs had known for decades — that Zionism is Nazism. Terrified to lose their grip of their narrative in the West, Zionists rushed to establish media watchdog groups like the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA). Their mission was to paper over the truth of Israel’s crimes by pressuring outlets to issue “corrections” and adopt editorial standards that toe the Zionist line.
The current executive editor of The New York Times, Joseph Kahn, learned to read and analyze the news with his father, Leo, who sat on the board of CAMERA for at least 18 years. Leo was still on the board when his son was first hired at the Times in 1998. Kahn, the highest-ranking journalist in the paper’s newsroom, continues his father’s legacy of propping up Zionist lies under the banner of objectivity.
This is but one of the many material links that bind The New York Times to the Zionist project — to apartheid, occupation, and genocide. Many of the Times’s top-ranking editors, reporters, and executives who cover Palestine have served in the Israeli military and have close family members who have; have worked or still work directly for Israeli think tanks; or live in stolen Palestinian homes.
As a groundswell rises in solidarity with the Palestinian people, more and more are coming to recognize the Times’ narrative collusion with Israel and are joining our ongoing work to expose its revisionism, reveal its material ties to the Zionist entity, and ensure that there are consequences for its journalistic malpractice. Actionists have blockaded the Times’ Long Island printing plant, hacked New York City subway ads in a détournement of its signature font, staged pickets outside Kahn’s West Village apartment, occupied the lobby of its Manhattan headquarters, and doused its facade with red paint and the message “NYT LIES GAZA DIES.”
How else can we hold such an institution accountable? Writers Against the War on Gaza launched our Boycott, Divest, Unsubscribe campaign in an effort to get writers and readers to break away from the Times well over a year ago. While this campaign has undoubtedly changed perceptions of the paper, more is needed. To that end, we helped bring together a coalition of organizations in the Palestine solidarity movement with the aim of severing the economic relationships that the Times depends on. That doesn’t just mean subscribers or advertisers — but also the writers the Times pays to lend the paper legitimacy.
Our coalition has identified the key role that the Times’ Opinion section, in particular, plays in laundering the paper’s reputation, creating plausible deniability for its complicity in genocide. Though many celebrated the paper for publishing an opinion piece finally calling Israel’s annihilatory campaign a genocide after two years, the news side of the operation kept denying it. It also uses the section to publish — and capture the clout of — young, especially Black and brown writers, that it would never bring into the newsroom as fulltime reporters. This blatant cynicism is not simple hypocrisy, but an attempt to curry favor with both Zionists and people of conscience.
Our coalition calls for anyone with a conscience — writers, academics, artists — to refuse any request to write for the Times opinion pages until three essential demands are met. First, that “Screams Without Words,” the discredited article which bolstered the myth of mass sexual abuse, be retracted. Second, that the editorial board use its massive influence over liberal opinion to demand an arms embargo. And, finally, that the Times reckon with deep anti-Palestinian bias in its newsroom by updating its style guide, methods of sourcing and citation, and hiring practices.
Over 300 past and potential contributors to the Times made this commitment before we launched publicly. Since then, another 200 former contributors or individuals covered by the paper have signed on, including Sara Ahmed, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, and Eman Mohammed. We hope you will as well.
The New York Times is the paper of record — and on the record we find decades of racist obfuscation and outright lies, a safeguard of Zionist violence. We must work together to undermine its prestige and legitimacy so that the Times no longer has the power to change the story. 3 4 5
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- Confusing government office with the wellsprings of power is a big part of the myth of meaningful democracy. Chris Hedges’ remarks, made in the context of the US, apply to the West at large:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Let’s Stop Pretending America is a Functioning Democracy
- See also my post of May 2024, “Mass rape by Hamas” – a truly evil lie. Given all that has emerged subsequently, on Israel’s systematic use of rape on Palestinian
hostagesprisoners detained without charge under its Unlawful Combatants Act, I note the Arab saying that “every Israeli accusation is in reality a confession”. - A same day BTL comment, by “bcg”, on the Mondoweiss version adds this:
[See] a highly informative piece from Truthout from last spring. Journalism Professors: NYT Risks Credibility With Inaction on Oct. 7 … ‘”Screams Without Words’: Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”, was widely circulated … and has been used by government officials and Zionist groups to supposedly justify Israel’s genocidal brutality against Palestinians in Gaza....The story made a number of allegations about systemic sexual and gender-based violence against Israeli women by Hamas fighters during the October 7 attack. But investigations by The Intercept and testimony reported on by other journalists found that Times journalists internally questioned the quality of the reporting … raising concerns that it didn’t meet the paper’s standards for evidence and fact-gathering and rather served to boost the paper’s pro-Israel slant … Reports have indeed raised grave concerns over The Times’s fact checking and freelancing process. Former Israeli air force intelligence official Anat Schwartz, one of two people responsible for gathering evidence for the story who had no previous reporting experience, has openly described a highly questionable process, saying that she contacted dozens of health facilities and rape crisis centers and found no evidence of the sexual violence that The Times had reported on.
Even the most thoroughly debunked of power-serving narratives may still have traction after being disproved. This applies not just to specific stories like the lies documented here, but to such overarching narratives as that “the Palestinians have shown again and again they don’t want peace”. These outlive their factual refutations because the lies are blared across the air waves, their rebuttals relegated to the small print of minority, hand-to-mouth alt-media sources. Ours is a species of story-tellers. For most of our 100,000 + years of walking the earth as homo sapiens-sapiens, this has served us well enough. Only now, with such powerful machinery for myth-making on a global scale at the service of a tiny elite, can its darker side be seen – and then only by the few who choose to look.
- Many now oppose Israel’s crimes in Palestine, so are waking up to the capacity of ‘our’ media first to deny, then, when the untenability of denial threatens the balancing act I referred to earlier, to obfuscate and equivocate on genocide by “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Too often, however, they remain blind to the reality of empire, hence to media complicity in its other crimes; in Syria for instance. For more on our widespread reluctance to join such dots, see the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
- I stress the systemic nature of media disinformation because we need not suppose bad faith on the part of practitioners. In a much quoted 1996 exchange at the BBC, Chomsky responded to Andrew Marr’s challenge, “how can you know I self censor?”
I do not say that you are self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you would not be sitting where you’re sitting.
Journalists who know what’s good for them please their editors. Editors who know what’s good for them please proprietors. Proprietors need advertisers and/or wealthy sponsors. This needn’t imply cold calculation. The subject of ideology, discussed clumsily in a post I wrote some two years ago, is vast and, since the ruling ideas of any age are those of its rulers, counterintuitive. Writers who seek to explore it often wind up losing their readers in labyrinthine prose. (All credit to Chomsky that he can speak simply on matters far from simple, a quality I also see in Caitlin Johnstone.) Here it suffices that (a) humans are good at believing what suits; (b) we’ve imbibed since infancy – from news not only produced but consumed by journalists, from school and college, and from arts and entertainment whose soft propaganda power is underrated – that ours is the worst system except for all the others; ergo (c) most journalists believe the dangerous drivel they so often write on matters close to power. To be crystal clear, however, such considerations do not absolve those who worked on that criminal NYT piece. They don’t even come close.