Breaking up with the New York Times

Confessions from a once diehard teenage fangirl

My New York Times subscription has gone the way of my Starbucks beverages and HP Instant Ink subscription. I — finally — canceled it.

When asked why by the customer service rep, I simply said, "I cannot support a publication that actively dehumanizes Palestinians." 

Not another nickel, not another dime, and all that.

Which is absolutely true.

And I realize this may read as a Jenny-come-lately self-righteous share.

But there’s more to this story, and it is totally confessional in nature:

This is a break up story.

Let me explain.

I'm the daughter of a journalism educator. As a kid, I read my local paper religiously — especially the comics and features, but often the news too. I was a high school newspaper nerd who served as co-editor-in-chief of our award-winning publication. Bernstein and Woodward were household names. I idolized columnists like Leonard Pitts and Maureen Dowd, and as far as I was concerned, Dave Barry was the funniest guy out there. I was a radio reporter in college, and, until I was 20, I dreamed of being a foreign correspondent for NPR (admittedly, a semblance of that dream lives on in my being a podcaster now!)

There were lots of great papers out there (this was still in the early days of local papers shutting their doors and before all the big papers were bought by billionaires). But amongst them all, the New York Times was the gold standard. What it lacked in design (let’s be honest, it’s never been a particularly pretty paper), it made up for with heavy-hitting investigative journalism.

As a teen, I dreamed of writing for the Times. As a young adult, I read the paper regularly as a trusted source on just about everything.

I decided to pay for a subscription in 2020, when I was reading all the paper’s stories about the pandemic and feeling grateful for the journalists who were scouring the data and pursuing quarantined sources in order to put together stories that helped me make sense of a chaotic time. Reading the Times newsletter was one of the first things I did every morning for several years. I became a devotee of The Daily podcast, getting my morning news fix on the way to my daughters’ daycare.

In a word, I worshipped the Times.

All of this changed after October 7.

I read the paper’s profoundly humanizing stories of those who were killed and harmed in the attacks on Southern Israel. As Israeli air strikes began over Gaza, I kept opening the NYT app on my phone, expecting to read stories about the residents of the apartment buildings I was seeing flattened by Israeli air strikes. I expected to hear from those directly affected by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign, whose stories were showing up on my social media feed thanks to the work of brave civilian journalists. But again and again I turned up…

Nothing.

While there were many examples of Israelis describing their experiences, there was a howling absence of Palestinian voices in mainstream media in general, and in the Times in particular. The stories featuring Palestinians were far and few between, their voices rarely featuring within the lede.

In other cases, it was worse than nothing.

I began to pick up on the paper’s use of the passive voice: When the Times mentioned Palestinians at all, they were simply “dead,” with no attribution of fault. I was startled by the adultification of Palestinian children through descriptors like “minors” and “people under 18,” whereas Israeli children were awarded the empathy-evoking moniker. I noticed Palestinians being referred to with language suggesting an inclination toward violence (e.g. “terrorists”), while this language was never used to describe Israel’s attacks on civilians. Where Israelis were “slaughtered” or “massacred,” Palestinians were simply “lives ended.” (Lives ended?! Who talks like this?!)

I picked up on a consistent flattening of the power dynamics at play, referring to Palestinians as though they had the same military capability as Israel, an occupying nuclear power bombing refugee camps, schools, universities and hospitals. There was no political context provided for the October 7 attacks, no background about the then-75 year occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionist state.

I was confused and disturbed. This didn’t seem like good journalism to me. Increasingly, it felt like propaganda. This was a devastating realization (naive as I realize that makes me sound).

A Welsh activist's letter to the editor of a Wales newspaper during Israel's 51-day war on Gaza in 2014

As the dehumanization of Palestinians became more obvious, I was learning about the substantial quantitative and qualitative research confirming a pattern of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab bias in Western media.

There have been several robust studies of media coverage of Israel and Palestine, both predating October 7 and in the months since. A recent one from 2023 looked at 33,000 Times articles from the First and Second Intifadas, confirming pro-Israel bias in the paper’s use of active/passive voice, its objectivity, tone and the violent sentiment of language used.

I also learned that editorial higher ups produced a style guide that systematically ensures more favorable coverage for Israel by limiting what reporters can and can’t say:

• Reporters were restricted from using: "genocide” or "ethnic cleansing.”

• They were to "avoid" the use of "occupied territories," "refugee camps" and "Palestine." (It’s worth noting that while the Associated Press Style Book takes the same tack as the Times with regard to the use of “Palestine,” this restriction is contrary to the norms of the United Nations and international humanitarian law).

The last year has shown me the incredible lengths to which the Times is willing to go to obfuscate the suffering of Palestinians, while laundering Israel’s war crimes and systemic injustices. Not least of these was the fabrication of mass sexual violence on October 7, a story which was used to manufacture consent for the aggression against Gaza, but failed to pass fact checks.

All of this made me contend with the degree to which the Times and other paragons of so-called liberal Western media serve as mouthpieces for US empire, and their motivation: money.

Be wary of corporate media

It’s not really accurate to simply call the Times a “paper.” It is a — highly lucrative — company. In the second quarter of this year, its operating profit grew by 13.6 percent, swelling to $104.7 million.

In spite of talking like a non-profit — we need you to subscribe so we can do good journalism! — the New York Times is not only ridiculously profitable, it also uses its profits to invest in ethically questionable ventures. These include a 2021 investment in OpenWeb, which brought that Israeli tech company to a value of $1 billion. OpenWeb uses AI to help companies curate their comments feeds while collecting user data to more effectively target advertisements.

While a VP at OpenWeb recently spoke of the importance of "removing any sign of hate or toxicity or racism,” it would be unwise to simply assume that the technology acts ethically. From police facial recognition technology that can’t tell Black people apart, to recruitment technologies presuming that BIPOC are less educated, we know that AI is far from neutral — it is deeply shaped by the biases of its programmers. Given the anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab racism baked into Israeli society, it is hard to imagine that the same bias wouldn’t feature in this technology. This series of interviews with Israelis from 2017 by Abby Martin is illustrative of the dehumanizing, discriminatory rhetoric that has been mainstreamed:

Learning about some of the major players at OpenWeb doesn’t offer reassurance.

Take the company’s Director of Growth and Strategy: Scrolling down his Facebook page, you’ll find photos of missiles, presumably of his time in the IDF (all Israelis over 18 are required to enlist). One missile is inscribed with the message, “Shine on you crazy diamond,” while another is accompanied by a 2008 Facebook comment from the OpenWeb employee translating to, “ahhhh, nostalgia.”

Then there’s OpenWeb board member Avishai Abrahami. The chief executive of Wix, a massive Israeli website-building company, Abrahami fired an Irish employee this year after she called Israel a “terrorist state” on social media. Wix is one of many Israeli tech companies that are an outgrowth of the IDF’s cyber intelligence Unit 8200. (This is the same unit that had intel about Hamas's capability to stage an incursion into Israel and was summarily dismissed). Unit 8200 predates the 1948 Nakba – its members bugged Palestinian phone lines in order to anticipate and suppress resistance efforts. Abrahami himself worked on Unit 8200, and has said that 100 of its members have gone on to found tech startups. For its part, Wix has hosted technology workshops for IDF cadets.

This is the tech ecosystem that Times funding is helping cultivate.

And the funding is bilateral: for a few years in the early 2000s, the New York Times Co. building in Manhattan was owned by Israeli conglomerate Africa Israel Investments.

As a conscientious consumer, as an ethical and moral human being, it is imperative to ask:

What realities is our consumption of this product making possible?

The Times isn’t just churning out stories that uphold the narrative of the apartheid state — it is actively being funded by and funding companies led by people who maintain this violent system and who have a vested interest in its perpetuation.

Suffice it to say, the Times is fueling the forces carrying out the Gaza genocide.

New York Idol, falling down

Phew.

If you read up to here and spotted all the links, you’ll know that I did a little investigatory journalism to get here. How to ask critical questions and chase down truth is, ironically, one of the lessons I learned from reading the paper for all these years. It is also what is making it untenable for me to continue to buy — or even trust — the New York Times.

I feel betrayed by the New York Times.

Maybe it could be compared to the death of a problematic relative. You loved them, but you also discovered in their old age what they really thought about the world, and their death leaves you with a mix of grief and angst over the way they lived their life.

Or maybe a better metaphor is that of an unfaithful partner. They put on a good show for a long time, until you discover it was all a masquerade. It leaves you wondering if any of it was real. And then you’re just raging amidst the unknown.

There’s a piece of me grieving the end of my relationship with the NYT. But a much bigger piece is angry.

I am angry that this institution sells itself as a do-gooder entity. That’s not to throw shade on all the journalists who are really seeking to do good journalism with ethics and integrity. But they are part of a profoundly broken system. And I grieve that this is the case.

This is also not an unfamiliar feeling.

My friend Rev. Leyla King, the visionary priest who invited me to serve as a founding member of Palestinian Anglicans and Clergy Allies, has said of our shared denomination, “I have been betrayed by the Episcopal Church.”

Now, I’ve been wrestling with the colonial legacy of this church since I joined it as a young adult over a decade ago. I was frustrated by the church being so tentative in its support during the Black Lives Matter movement. I’ve been deeply grieved over the church’s failure to take a bolder stand on Palestine. Yet while I feel an element of betrayal when it comes to the church, I suppose it hasn’t felt as jarring, because it isn’t new.

Similarly, the US government’s complicity in genocide has been infuriating. But definitely not surprising, and not a betrayal, per se – I don’t think I’ve ever really trusted the government.

I think betrayal by the Times feels different because, to some degree, I thought of journalists as the “good guys.” I placed an institution like the Times in a different category than the government or the church. I didn’t think of the Times as being in the journalism business in order to preserve its own power and that of other powerful interests. I perceived it as fighting the good fight to upend the status quo.

Ha. Boy, was I wrong.

Citizen journalist Abby Martin has said that “the New York Times… is like, the Bible for liberals.” It seems the biblical literalism and corresponding biblical idolatry of my evangelical childhood didn’t get abandoned when I left that stream of faith for another. I just attached my worship elsewhere. And in the process, I suspended, to a degree, my critical thinking.

A part of me still wanted to have faith in an institution. This was the last institution to go. I desperately wanted the Times to be “one of the good ones.” But this very notion is part of the problem:

If we forfeit our own responsibility for truth-seeking, we will be taken advantage of.

I’ve known this. But it still hurts like hell when our idealism falls apart. It is spiritually unmooring, every time. We can find ourselves asking if anyone is trustworthy. (Pro tip: separate individuals from institutions). Yet it is from this place of reckoning with reality that we can reroot spiritually in order to engage more strategically.

So where do we go from here? Hopefully, toward discerning consumption and critical thinking.

Telling a fuller, more truthful story

Stepping back from consuming the Times over the last year has necessitated a more proactive and critical engagement with news media. Here are a few publications I read often (though I read much more widely than this!):

• I have found publications like Mondoweiss (vitally, a non-profit) and Middle East Eye to be much more reliable sources for news on the Middle East.

• The Intercept (also a non-profit) is doing incredible investigatory journalism, including investigating the investigators at the Times.

• Alternative media like the Upstream podcast and the Empire Files (you can get a taste of both with this fantastic recent interview by the Upstream team of journalist Abby Martin).

• Independent news organizations like YES! Magazine provide a solutions journalism approach – a helpful way to get out of the doom scrolling and into a creative headspace for the sake of courageous living.

• Sojourners provides a critical faith lens on politics and world events.

• Finally, folks here on Substack like

  Joshua P. Hill
  and
  Frederick Joseph
  write about politics from a place of deep personal integrity and skin in the game.

What about you? Have you had to “break up” with previously trusted sources of truth? What are you reading that is helping you think critically? What is supporting you in your spiritual sturdiness and strategic creativity? I would love to hear from you!

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Want to learn more about the New York Times’s track record on Palestine? Check out newyorkwarcrimes.com

Also, if you end up unsubscribing from the New York Times, maybe consider sending $5 of what you were spending to support A Soulful Revolution? And then float the other $15 around to other independent writers, journalists and media. Thanks for your support.