May 11 felt strangely clarifying. Not because The New York Times did anything new that day—it certainly didn’t. It just kept on Times-ing.
As the Eurovision semi-finals opened in Vienna, the Times published two major pieces about Israel simultaneously: a front-page investigation alleging Israel had “co-opted” Eurovision through a government-backed voting campaign, and a Nicholas Kristof column that set a new low for “opinion journalism.”
The first article was a front-page investigation with a headline that went through multiple versions. First, it was “How Israel ‘Co-opted’ Eurovision — and Nearly Broke the World’s Biggest Song Contest.”
A curious assertion, at best, which I guess the Times felt was a little harsh, so it was modified.
Second version: “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.”
Sounds innocuous. It wasn’t.
The article went on to allege that the Israeli government had run a “well-organized campaign” spending over $1 million to influence Eurovision voting and burnish what the paper called Israel’s “ailing image.”
The Times’ Eurovision investigation reads, in the words of the Jewish Chronicle’s Jonathan Sacerdoti, as “a lengthy pearl-clutching exercise in narrative construction.” The paper alleged, with great solemnity, that the Israeli government had spent money on online advertising to encourage people to vote for its entry, and that a government official (the prime minister!) had posted on social media encouraging supporters to cast votes. Foul play, the Times implied. A cynical manipulation of a beloved institution! A soft-power operation dressed in sequins!
What’s the problem? Well, the Times’ own reporters were forced to acknowledge, buried deep in the same article, that Israel had not broken any Eurovision rules. There were no bots, no vote manipulation, and there were no covert tactics.
There was…advertising.
The same kind of advertising that is used by every participating country as a matter of routine. Malta ran a similar campaign. Poland ran a similar campaign. European diaspora voting blocs (Turkish communities in Germany, Portuguese communities in France, Lithuanian communities in the UK) have been shaping Eurovision results for decades, as researchers at the University of Central Florida confirmed in a study covering 60 years of voting data. Sweden has industrialized song contest success through its Melodifestivalen selection process so thoroughly that Swedish producers now write and produce entries for half the continent. None of this has ever been considered scandalous; it is simply how Eurovision works.
Meanwhile, the Times ignored the actual documented violations during the same period it investigated. In 2025, Spain’s public broadcaster aired a pro-Palestinian political statement during the live Eurovision final, a clear breach of the contest’s apolitical rules; Spain’s prime minister had personally demanded Israel’s expulsion from the contest. Unfortunately for the Spanish government, the Spanish public gave Israel “douze” (12) points: the maximum. The people of Ireland, whose national broadcaster was boycotting the 2026 contest entirely on political grounds, also gave Israel 12 points in 2025.
On the flipside, a Norwegian juror, Daniel Owen, publicly admitted on Instagram after the 2024 contest that he had deliberately withheld points from Israel because of his views on Gaza. He knew this was against the rules, and he said so publicly.
The Times did not investigate him.
The Times investigated Israel.
The Eurovision investigation was not even the most remarkable thing the Times published that day. It also ran the Kristof opinion column, which made allegations of systematic sexual violence committed on Palestinian prisoners by dogs at the behest of Israeli soldiers—allegations so biologically implausible that even critics of Israel struggled to defend them. The sourcing was NGOs with documented pro-Hamas positions. The sole “expert” cited carries a history of serious credibility allegations. No physical evidence was presented. No named witnesses. Just anonymous claims, laundered through the Times’ masthead into something that arrived on breakfast tables worldwide wearing the costume of journalism.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry called it “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press.” Former U.S. Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt asked publicly whether the Times had “no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility.” The paper has not retracted it, and, in fact, has doubled down on its support of the piece.
That last fact is the one that matters. The Times knows what it published. It has seen the criticism from people who cannot be dismissed as reflexive Israel defenders. It has chosen, deliberately, to stand behind the piece. That tells you more about the institution than any single editorial decision could.
That is the Times in 2026. That is a choice. It is the same choice the paper has been making, in one form or another, for decades; it is wildly on-brand for the Times to make hysterical claims against Israel at every opportunity.
In case you forgot, back in 2019, The Times’ international print edition published a political cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as President Trump’s guide dog. Bibi was leashed, on all fours, wearing a collar bearing the Star of David, while Trump was depicted wearing a Jewish kippah. The cartoon ran during Passover. It was published by the world’s most self-consciously edited newspaper, in an edition that goes through layers of editorial review, and not a single person in that chain caught what any freshman student of Jewish history would have recognized immediately: that depicting the leader of the Jewish state as a dog controlled by a leash bearing the Star of David is a centuries-old antisemitic image. The Nazis used it, medieval Europe used it, and the Times used it in 2019.
When the backlash came, the Times initially said nothing. It took sustained public pressure before the paper admitted it had “used antisemitic tropes,” issued a tepid apology, and quietly canceled its syndication deal with the cartoon’s distributor. The editor who approved it was disciplined but never identified. No one was fired. The institutional culture that allowed it to happen was never publicly examined. The Times moved on…as it always does.
It moved on to other breathless parroting of blood libels.
On Oct. 17, 2023, the Times published its lead web headline: “Israeli Airstrike Killed 500 at a Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.” It was, in almost every particular, false. The explosion was caused by a failed rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not by Israel. It struck the hospital’s parking lot, not the hospital itself. The death toll was between 50 and 100, not 500. The sole source cited was the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health…described, without blinking, as “Palestinians.” The headline was shared millions of times in hours. Riots broke out across the Middle East. King Abdullah of Jordan canceled a summit with President Biden, Egyptian President Sisi, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. A subsequent peer-reviewed academic study found that the Times made five distinct errors in a single headline and never adequately corrected them. Inadequate corrections about, and hostility toward, the Jewish people and Israel are themselves a documented pattern at the paper.
A pattern that did not begin recently.
In 1922, the Times reassured readers that Hitler’s antisemitism was probably just rhetoric. In the 1930s, it kept a bureau chief who defended Nazism publicly and constrained reporters who tried to tell the truth. During the Holocaust, it buried the systematic murder of 6 million Jews next to the shoe polish ads because its publisher feared the paper might look too Jewish. After the war, it opposed Jewish statehood and endorsed British policies that blocked Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine. And we’ve already talked about recent history.
I’m done arguing about whether each incident was intentional or whether each editor meant it. It doesn’t matter if the headline was merely sloppy or if the omission was merely unfortunate. The accumulation becomes the story.
This isn’t about disagreement with Israeli policy; after all, debate over policy is constant. It’s about proportion, consistency, and the repeated framing of Israel as uniquely suspect. The Times does not merely cover Israel; it frames Israel, constantly and relentlessly. And when the facts collapse later, the emotional and political damage has already been done.
The New York Times still produces brilliant journalism and employs enormously talented reporters. It remains, in many ways, the most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world, which is exactly why this matters. The Times shapes moral imagination and decides which suffering feels urgent, which violence deserves skepticism, which narratives arrive pre-packaged as credible, and which victims quietly disappear between the folds of the paper. The Times has made its choice. And it keeps making it.
Here is what is impossible to ignore: on May 11, 2026 (the same day the Times ran these two pieces), a 300-page report titled “Silenced No More” was released publicly. It documented Hamas’s sexual violence on Oct. 7, 2023, based on 430 interviews and more than 10,000 photographs and videos. It was one of the most comprehensive human rights documents produced about that attack.
The New York Times did not cover it.
The paper that found space on its front page that day for a Eurovision soft-power investigation found no space at all for a 300-page report documenting the systematic rape and assault of Israeli women.
So, I’m out.
Wordle, Connections, The Daily, The Athletic, all of it. Not because it will financially wound The New York Times. It certainly won’t.
I unsubscribed because eventually there has to be some small cost for teaching millions of readers to instinctively view the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely deceitful, uniquely illegitimate, and uniquely guilty before the evidence even arrives.
Or even after it does.
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