The NYT’s “Craft”, Shattering the Glasshouse and Failing Journalism.

Disclaimer: This piece is a direct response to The New York Times’ coverage in the first 200 days following the Hamas attacks on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli military assault on Gaza, a bombardment and genocide continuing at the time of this publication. This troubling coverage and the failure of legacy media institutions writ large persists, as demonstrated by the 2024 Pulitzer Prize Committee’s awarding of The New York Times for international reporting, which was further undercut by recent leaked memos from NYT staff instructing them to avoid the use of words like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.”

The New York Times Tower, or “the Glasshouse,” in Manhattan has been the heart of the U.S. movement on journalistic integrity and reporting when lives are at stake. Journalists in the Writers Bloc and members of the Writers Against the War on Gaza organization are calling out the company’s appalling coverage of the siege of Palestine and Israel’s occupation. A paper called The New York (War) Crimes was written in response to reporting from the NYT that indicates increasing complicity in Israel’s war crimes. 

From their refusal to use the word “ethnic cleansing” to the obscuring use of passive voice, The NYT is the US’s biggest tool for genocide denialism. Denialism isn’t limited to denying the genocide of Palestinians, however: for The NYT, denial is a more complex and dangerous narrative that is rooted in ignoring historical context, avoiding the allocation of blame, and intentionally manipulating facts through obfuscation. 

This goes beyond minor inaccuracies in reporting and “bad faith” journalism. The NYT’s “craft,” inherent to their writing style, systemically justifies genocide by deliberately academicizing situations through a “both sides” narrative in an attempt to remain neutral. This myth is at the forefront of The NYT reporting and Editorial Standards, which state “The need for neutrality on divisive issues.” In the quest to equalize unequal suffering and find a neutral, “both sides” narrative to every story, they present an equilibrium that does not exist. 

Equating the oppression of people to the plight against it is not impartiality. Rather, it avoids an already partial story, one that accounts years' worth of oppression and the resistance against it. For the oppressor, neutrality, then, becomes a tool to justify oppression: perpetuating mollifying narratives of “the other side” as opposed to the wrong one. Journalism does not and has never required neutrality, especially not in a world where neutrality is a fiction. 

Then there is the problem of purposefully muddied diction: when reporting on Palestinians and their oppression at the hands of Israel, many of The NYT’s headlines exclude crucial nouns and/or verbs, or use the wrong word entirely. In an article describing the death of three Palestinians, the NYT’s subheading states Israeli airstrikes “claimed” Palestinian lives. The use of the word “claim” explicitly avoids stating that the state of Israel is responsible for their deaths. How difficult could replacing the word “killed” be? What is the purpose of such a placeholder? The NYT’s phrasing removes blame, a frequent issue in their coverage of Palestinian oppression, one so often repeated so as to avoid being reduced to accident or oversight. Their vagueness is intentional, and damning. 

Headline after headline showcases the same pattern: 

‘To Battle Wartime Hunger, Gazans Turn to a Humble Leafy Green,’ Hunger caused by who? Who is humbling them? 

‘Two major Palestinian mobile networks, Jawwal and Paltel, said that their phone lines and internet services were down,’ Who was responsible for the downed lines? How did it happen?? ‘Half of Gazans Are at Risk of Starving, U.N. Warns,’ Who is starving them? 

‘Displaced Gazans in the South Facing Dangers They Had Sought to Escape,’ Danger from what? Escape from who? 

‘Nearly Half of Gaza’s Population Displaced in Humanitarian Crisis,’ Who is responsible for displacing them? 

‘He Wanted to Serve His Community in Gaza. He Paid With His Life’ Who took his life?

In the same headline where The NYT writes Gazans are “facing danger,” the dek adds to the blamelessness, explaining that “Many residents feel that no place is safe after an airstrike in an area of southern Gaza where Israel had ordered people to seek shelter.” Again, The NYT avoids language that could incriminate Israel. “An airstrike” from who? Where are these residents from? Did this “area” happen to be a house, hospital, refugee camp? The headline ignores the fact that Israel is also bombing South Gaza, where it told people to “seek shelter” or die. 

This is intentional. Answering these questions directly in the piece doesn’t allow the NYT to deliberately minimize the impact, and being explicit could change the narrative. If they say who is starving, displacing, and removing internet access in Gaza, it would challenge the status quo and ruin Israel’s image as the primary victim. 

Beginning in October, as The NYT undertook reporting on the War on Gaza—or, in their framing, the “Israel-Hamas War”—headlines and writing shared patterns of incorrect diction, passive voice, and biased sourcing, many of which remain evident now 200 days into the genocide. This word has yet to be used by The NYT.

In an October 13 headline, The NYT writes ‘Israel Sticks to Call for Gaza Evacuation and Readies a Possible Invasion.’ “Evacuation” works as a verb here, to mean: “to move people from a dangerous place to somewhere safe.” However, nothing about Israel’s actions in Gaza is “safe.” Many Gazans were faced with two options: Abide by the unlawful demands to leave their homes or be killed by the IDF. The fate of either choice was the same: those who left their homes were killed on the instructed path of evacuation from North Gaza to South Gaza by Israeli forces, or later when the IDF began their onslaught on Southern Gaza. The word “evacuation” serves not only as a minimizing tool but as a means of inaccurate representation, reducing the lethal realities of Israel’s occupation in Palestine. There isn’t anywhere to “evacuate” to. As Palestinians continue to starve, violence hasn’t been mediated—only perpetuated as the norm. 

In another headline, The NYT’s summarizes the mass murder of over one hundred members of a  Palestinian family as “Family trees have been dismembered, and whole branches obliterated.” Yet they avoid usage of the very word that encapsulates this kind of obliteration: genocide. 

If the death of 30,000 people by a single racist, colonial entity doesn’t warrant the use of the word genocide, what does? For The NYT,  diction is used to victimize the oppressor and equate the resistance against oppression to the occupation itself. 

On October 9, The NYT called the raid of an Israeli village by the Palestinian militias a “massacre,” and repeatedly characterized Hamas’s attacks on Israel October 7th as an apt “terror attack.” However, the NYT refuses to apply the same standards when covering attacks that Israel perpetrates against Palestinian civilians. Israel’s decades' worth of oppression, from the first Nakba in 1947 to the current onslaught of targeted killings and hospital bombings, is often reduced to “an airstrike” conducted by an anonymous entity, or an “explosion” that may or may not be an Israeli bomb. 

A January 9 investigation conducted by The Intercept’s Adam Johnso and Othman Ali, into The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, showed a blatant double standard in the use of emotive words to describe the death of Israelis versus Palestinians. The word “slaughter” was used 60 times more often for Israel than for Palestinians, the ratio for “massacred” was 125 to 2, and for “horrific” it was 36 to 4. The narrative that this all began on October 7 removes years of historical context, flattening the complexity and depth of the complete picture. Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian Ambassador to the UN in New York, characterized this best when explaining, “History for some media and politicians starts when Israelis are killed.” 

The same avoidant diction was displayed in a November 5 headline that reads, ‘Explosion Gazans Say Was Airstrike Leaves Many Casualties in Dense Neighborhood.’ The arrangement of words here is vague, confusing, and objectively bizarre. The NYT insinuates doubt that an Israeli airstrike was the cause by writing “explosion” and “Gazans say,” rather than reporting with precision. 

After they’ve deflected from the cause, they move to deflect the effects. By writing “many casualties,” they avoid detailing the extent of the impact: Forty-seven people were killed. Lastly, the “dense neighborhood” that the headline refers to happens to be the Al Maghazi refugee camp. By excluding that Israel bombed a refugee camp, the NYT removes any inherent indication that the people killed were civilians. The dek later refers to the people killed as “the lifeless,” reducing people with stories, desires, and dreams to mere corpses. 

This is what the NYT does: it removes humanity from people. Its actions are nothing short of Orwellian, sanitizing reality so that it better serves their editorial interests. 

But this issue doesn’t stop at the headlines. If a person happens to be in the minority 40% of Americans who move beyond headlines and read entire articles, they’ll find the same pattern repeated. 

In 2018, Usaid Siddiqui and Owais A. Zaheer, two data researchers for 416LABS, evaluated U.S. Mainstream Media Coverage of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. The research conducted N-grams, which analyze sequences of words and data, of five major US outlets—including The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal— and found that, “Israeli sources are nearly two and half times (250%) more likely to be quoted as Palestinian ones.” 

This is evident in how the NYT frames its articles. A click on the NYT “Israel-Hamas War News” section during the first 100 days of Israeli aggression featured countless headlines that began with “Israel says…” Looking for an alternative, much less a Palestinian, perspective required a deep-dive. As of April of 2024, these western and Israeli-based perspectives remain at the forefront of sourcing on Gaza. 

In a 2021 study on Media Bias against Palestine in the NYT’s coverage, Holly Jackson found that the NYT used passive voice to refer to Palestinians 15.7%, as opposed to the 6.4% of the time it did the same for Israelis, more than twice as often. By using phrases like “have died” or “were hit ”, the NYT minimizes “The responsibility of Israeli aggressors in causing Palestinian suffering,” Jackson explains. 

This is a pattern and is not unique to The New York Times: Western legacy media has a history of downplaying the struggles of the Global South. For decades, subtle Orientalism—the Western style of “dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient,'' as defined by Palestinian-American academic Edward Said—has flourished in Western society since the colonial movements in the East. The current media injustice is just an extension of Said’s idea. Examples of this Orientalism and misrepresentation can be found across Western media outlets, from The Washington Post’s new euphemism of “Lives found ended” when talking about the death of four babies in Gaza, to The Guardian writing that Palestinian protesters “received bullets” from the IDF. The media dehumanizes Palestinian existence so that their deaths are justifiable and their killings are more acceptable. The coverage shapes what readers believe. 

While the current coverage may shock those who are only now following The NYT,  it was only twenty years ago that The NYT misinformed the American public about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which ended with the death of over 1 million innocent civilians. The following year, in May of 2004, a Letter From the Editors of The NYT detailed how the news outlet had misreported the “regime change” in several articles and published claims that were ​​”questionable… insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”

That is not to say that writers for the NYT haven't, on occasion, written credible reporting that reflects the reality of the occupation. The NYT’s Yousur Al-Hliou’s video accounts of Israel’s aggressions on November 3 and Raja Abdulrahim’s reporting on Israel’s ongoing war hospitals provide insight into the daily oppression faced by Palestinians.  These stories exist in The NYT database but are often distorted by headlines that misrepresent the facts, something that writers don’t have any say in.

Too, The NYT’s Editorial Standards state that, “Staff members may not march or rally in support of public causes or movements…similar events if doing so might reasonably raise doubts about their ability or The Times’s ability to function as neutral observers in covering the news.” 

These “standards” serve as another arm of the system and keep the machine that is the NYT running, and even its writers recognized this. Almost one month into the current siege, NYT Magazine editor and writer, Jazmine Hughes who signed an open letter condemning Israel’s siege on Gaza, was forced out of the publication for violating “The Times’s policy on public protest.” 

Hughes, who has since left the publication, is not the only NYT writer challenging the Industry. Jamie Lauren Keiles, former contributing writer for the Times also signed the letter and resigned shortly after, stating, “I owe nothing to the institution of the Times. The idea that the Times would have some hold on my speech seemed ludicrous to me.” 

As legacy media institutions like The NYT fail to publish the truth, the writers whose labor they exploit are forced to push narratives that align with the institutional political goals. As a result, the reality of Palestinian suffering falls in between the cracks. 

But this cycle can be broken: Western writers should refuse to repeat this vague, obfuscating reporting, and instead work to unravel the centuries worth of hate written between the lines. It is up to these writers to shatter the Glasshouse from the inside or leave it in the name of humanity. 

Readers, thinkers, writers, and people writ large who intend to maintain their dignity can also end their role in the cycle by thinking beyond headlines, looking beyond imperialist news sources like The NYT. It takes effort to find nuanced, accurate reporting, and understand that powerhouse newspapers often have an agenda of their own. 

As Fargo Tbakhi, a Palestinian writer, wrote in Protean Magazine on craft and writing “In The Hour of Genocide”, “The language is poisoned already. There is no cure.”