The New York Times' Rules About Its Palestine Coverage Sure Are Interesting

Not allowed: openly supporting Gaza. Definitely allowed: calling anti-war protests dangerous left-wing activism.

Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images

One thing our leading news organizations pride themselves on is their rigorous dedication to “objective” reporting. The only way for readers to trust journalists, they emphasize, is for those journalists not to be seen aligning themselves with any particular point of view.

It is this adherence to the god of journalistic neutrality that prompted the management of the New York Times to attack some of its staffers after they joined critics of the paper’s transphobic reporting. It’s also what prompted Times staffer Jazmine Hughes and freelance contributor Jamie Lauren Keiles to cut their ties with the paper after they signed an open letter in support of Palestine recently. Management had made it clear to them that taking such a public stance was incompatible with continued association with the Times.

Now, I don’t believe in the Times version of objective journalism, but rules are rules, right? You know what you’re signing up for when you join the Times, and you’ve just got to deal.

So I was interested to read this piece by Nicholas Confessore on the front page of Monday’s Times. Look at how it begins and tell me if you sense any “point of view” poking its head through (emphasis mine):

For years, conservatives have struggled to persuade American voters that the left-wing tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous. Universities and their students, they’ve argued, have been increasingly clenched by suffocating ideologies — political correctness in one decade, overweening “social justice” in another, “woke-ism” most recently — that shouldn’t be dismissed as academic fads or harmless zeal.

The validation they have sought seemed to finally arrive this fall, as campuses convulsed with protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews.

So this is a news reporter, in the news pages of the Times—not the opinion pages—saying that, among other things, “protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza” seem to have “validated” conservative claims that “the left-wing tilt of higher education is not only wrong but dangerous.” Does this appear like a point of view to you, or not?

You might say, “But what about the part about hostile, sometimes violent anti-Jewish rhetoric?” Well, violent rhetoric towards Jews—or pretty much anyone, really—is obviously wrong. But linking that to anti-war protests, and flatly stating that both of these things validate conservative arguments about lefty campus craziness, is still very much bringing a point of view to the table.

The piece is pegged to the brouhaha currently underway about what a bunch of very fancy college presidents have been saying about antisemitism. I am not that interested in this brouhaha. On Saturday, an analysis in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz concluded that Israel’s war on Gaza has killed a higher proportion of civilians than were killed in all of the conflicts of the 20th century. That, to me, is a more significant thing happening right now than what the University of Pennsylvania’s board of trustees thinks about antisemitism.

But I am interested in the rules that the New York Times, the most important news outlet in the United States, appears to set for itself, particularly around Israel and Palestine.

Confessore’s piece—given the always-fishy label of “news analysis,” which is just another way of saying “this reporter is giving their opinion but we’re not going to call it that”—is full of very bold declarations from a supposedly neutral writer. Such as:

On the presidential campaign trail, where Republican contenders largely phased out their critiques of college woke-ism this summer after finding it had limited appeal to a broader political audience, the issue came back to the fore at last Wednesday’s debate.

“Woke-ism”—a highly contestable phrase about a highly contestable concept—is apparently now an acceptable term for a New York Times journalist to run, without quotes, as a descriptor in a news piece. Got it.

Yet for many on the right, the careful, evasive answers from three college presidents at Tuesday’s hearing — Ms. Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — were in stark contrast to those institutions’ long indulgence of left-wing sensitivities around race and gender.

All three institutions have in recent years punished or censored speech or conduct that drew anger from the left.

Note that Confessore is not attributing the idea that these schools have “indulged left-wing sensitivities” to “many on the right.” He is taking that idea for granted, and is saying that, for many on the right, this proves that there’s a double standard. Agree or disagree, you can’t deny that that is, once again, a clearly opinionated thing to say.

So let’s get the rules straight.

If you are a New York Times staffer—even one like Hughes, who mostly writes magazine profiles that have nothing to do with Palestine—and you sign an open letter in support of Palestine, you have crossed a bright red line and gone so far beyond the limits of your job description that there can be no future for you at the paper. Even if you’re a freelancer like Keiles, it’s deemed untenable for your association with the Times to continue.

However, if you are Nicholas Confessore, and you want to directly link protests against the war on Gaza to the idea that left-wing activism at universities is “dangerous,” and you also want to accept the idea that leftists have been “indulged” at these campuses, and that “woke-ism” is a thing at all, you not only get to do that, but they will put it on the front page of the newspaper. They will also blast it out to their readers in a news alert.

They will even translate it into Chinese!

It’s good to know what the rules are, isn’t it?