This week, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) targeted The New York Times for its anti-Israel bias with a giant billboard outside the paper’s office windows.
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The billboard reads: “The New York Times – At it AGAIN: Defaming Israel with distorted ‘news.’ Stop the bias.”
Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director, stated, “The billboard represents the collective voice of hundreds of thousands of people frustrated at the Times’s shoddy reporting and bias against Israel. We’re inundated with complaints about the New York Times, and for good reason.”
In the first four months of 2018 alone, the Times has published a voluminous amount of factual errors; so many, in fact, that CAMERA created what it calls a “New York Times Line,” a timeline that tracks the egregious faults. Ironically, the paper recently ran an ad campaign that lauded the paper as the arbiter of truth.
Levin added, “Numerous examples of error-ridden articles at the Times have been documented by CAMERA analysts. There are years when the coverage seems more attentive to objectivity and balance and other times when opinion pours into the ‘news’ and editors allow this – and refuse to correct clearcut factual errors. We seem to be back in one of those periods.”
CAMERA has listed the errors here.
Gilead Ini, a senior research analyst at CAMERA, pointed out, “All we ask is that the Times live up to its own standards of accuracy and accountability. The New York Times can and should provide excellent journalism, but unfortunately its coverage of Israel right now is often marred by errors, bias, and significant omissions. In the recent Gaza violence driven by Hamas, to mention just one instance, the Times termed the barrages of fire bombs, rocks and attempts to tear down the border fence an ‘experiment with nonviolent protest’.”
CAMERA published a monograph titled Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, which includes an analysis of the bias in New York Times coverage over many years.
CAMERA has tried to draw attention to the Times anti-Israel bias before; in 2013-2014, CAMERA created a billboard campaign across New York City.
The current billboard, located in a high-traffic setting, will be seen by 100,000 passersby a day.
Levin concluded, “Once again, readers won’t be silent when Israel is maligned by the publication.”