The Committee to Protect Journalists recently voted not to exclude from its list of journalists those who are either in militant groups or backed by state-sponsored media. The question of trust and reliability when it comes to news and information from conflicts involving terrorists continues.
Just a few weeks back, Nicholas Kristof wrote a dubiously reported opinion piece about the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli detention that stitched together unreliable sources into a blood libel against the Jewish people. It was unsurprising to me. As an Iraqi immigrant, these claims were similar to the denigration of Jews I heard all the time growing up in the Middle Eastern subculture. Yet a second problem of his own making has emerged that further casts Kristof’s reliability and honesty into question.
When Kristof left the New York Times in 2021 after 37 years, 20 of them as a columnist, to run for governor of Oregon, he created an ethical challenge for the paper. Many donors to Kristof’s campaign were people he had covered or worked alongside, or who moved within the same professional circles. When his campaign ended and he returned to his column, the New York Times publicly addressed the issue. Upon his return, the paper told Rolling Stone that he would avoid writing about those donors or disclose the relationship. He did neither. The New York Times appears never to have held Kristof accountable for violating its vow of transparency.
A policy is only as strong as its enforcement, and according to reporting by Semafor’s Max Tani, Kristof quoted and praised former donors without telling readers. In one column, he cited Bill and Melinda French Gates, who gave his campaign $100,000, as authorities on global health. In another, he quoted a McKinsey executive, whose family gave $5,000, on India’s economy. He also featured a $25,000 donor’s nonprofit organization in three consecutive holiday giving guides. A New York Times spokesperson conceded to Semafor that the connections “should have been made more clear to readers.”
The defense is that there was no quid pro quo, and on the narrow question of whether Kristof cited these sources as thanks for their campaign support, that may be true. But outright favor-trading is not the only issue at stake. Disclosure exists because readers cannot see inside a writer’s personal and professional relationships and are owed the facts to weigh the work for themselves. A conflict of interest, in the canons that have governed the craft for a century, is not an accusation of dishonesty. It is a situation in which a reasonable reader — if informed — might discount what he or she is reading. Kristof had only to say so and let readers decide. He chose not to. The New York Times’s bans on donations, gifts, and partisanship are not about preventing bribery. They are about protecting the one asset a newspaper cannot replace: the reader’s belief that what appears on the page is an unbiased story.
And many readers are now far less likely to extend him the benefit of the doubt. The disclosure lapses surfaced just as Kristof’s May essay, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” was found to be riddled with errors and unsubstantiated claims. In that piece, he claimed, without evidence, that Israel trains dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, an allegation many experts call biologically impossible. The Wall Street Journal called the piece “poorly sourced.” The Free Press called it a “miscarriage of journalism.” It’s hard to take someone seriously who writes not as an objective journalist but more like a Middle Eastern crank whose aim is to blame the Jews for every evil under the sun.
The sourcing also did not withstand examination. Kristof leaned on Ramy Abdu, whose Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor has documented ties to Hamas; on the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is under public scrutiny for including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members among its list of “journalists”; and on witnesses whose accounts have shifted between tellings. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whom Kristof quoted as confirming the abuse, later said flatly, “I did not validate these claims.” This pattern of credulity or distortion on Kristof’s part isn’t new. In 2014, Kristof acknowledged that a story he built around Somaly Mam, a Cambodian advocate against sex trafficking, was likely fabricated.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF’S ANTI-ZIONIST CONSPIRACY THEORIES
The New York Times’s own handbook requires staff to check facts carefully and to do “nothing that might erode readers’ faith and confidence” in its work. A column built on contradictory testimony and an allegation no expert will corroborate cannot be squared with that standard any more than a dozen buried conflicts of interest can. Both failures raise the same question: When this institution tells the public to trust its process, is the process actually there?
I write not as an adversary of the New York Times but as an immigrant and a writer paying attention to how the American press earned its authority, and how quickly it drains away when an institution holds its own stars to a more lax standard than it demands of others. If the New York Times will neither correct the record, retract the column, nor open a standards investigation, it leaves readers with a larger question: Why should they trust the paper’s standards at all?
Luma Simms is an Iraqi immigrant whose work focuses on the Middle East and accurate reporting in the region. She is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a writer whose work focuses on immigration, culture, and the moral foundations of American public life.