Author says New York Times is ‘beyond redemption’ after coverage of Hamas terror attacks on Israel falls short
Ashley Rindsberg, who penned 2021 book ‘The Gray Lady Winked,’ accusd the Times of ‘bias against Israel’ during coverage of Hamas terrorist attacks.
Author Ashley Rindsberg said The New York Times and other American media outlets are showing deep-rooted "bias against Israel" in coverage of the deadly Hamas terror attack that left hundreds dead over the weekend – but the Gray Lady has defended the paper's "voluminous" reporting.
Rindsberg, a journalist who penned the 2021 book "The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History," has long felt the Times is prejudiced.
"The New York Times’ bias against Israel, I would say at this point, it's not even overt or explicit, which it is. It's beyond the pale," Rindsberg, who previously lived in Tel Aviv, told Fox News Digital.
The New York Times did not feature viral images of kidnapped Israeli women and children on Sunday or Monday. (The New York Times )
The Times’ front page on Sunday declared "Palestinian militants stage attack on Israel," with images of rockets fired from Gaza City, covered bodies of Israelis who were "killed by militants," Palestinians mourning the death of "a slain militant" and a truck breaching the border fence along southern Israel. Rindsberg, who lived in Israel for nearly two decades, believes the lack of a powerful image of Hamas kidnapping women and children is proof the paper has an agenda.
"They have taken babies into Gaza as captives. And if that is not on the front page of The New York Times, if a photo of that baby is not the main image and the sole image in The New York Times, you know that this problem is far gone," Rindsberg said. "The New York Times, and this is my sincere belief, is beyond redemption at this point."
On Monday, the Times continued to keep kidnapped women and children off the front page while focusing on "a stunning intelligence failure" by Israel. The words "terror" and "terrorists" were nowhere to be found on the Times’ front page on Sunday or Monday. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., even called out the Times for including Hamas terrorists in the death count and compared it to including the 19 hijackers on the death toll when reporting about the attacks of September 11, 2001. The Times has used the term "terrorist attacks" to refer to the assault in some of its online coverage.
"I mean, what we're seeing is, it's always a sort of, a steady ramp up. And it begins with the equivocation. You know, you get these numbers… comparing Israeli deaths, which are civilians, they mix in the hundreds of terrorist deaths with Gaza civilian deaths to try to create this fake balance," Rindsberg said. "This is not balanced. What happened was a massacre of civilians by terrorists."
ISRAEL DECLARES WAR AFTER HAMAS SURPRISE ATTACK, LAUNCHES RETALIATORY AIRSTRIKES IN GAZA
Ashley Rindsberg is an investigative journalist, novelist, and author of "The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History." (Courtesy Ashley Rinsberg)
A spokesperson for The New York Times vehemently defended the paper’s coverage.
"This description of The Times's coverage of the horrific attack is inaccurate, as any fair reading of our voluminous coverage of the assault makes clear," Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told Fox News Digital.
Rindsberg took particular exception to a "news analysis" piece by Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen, who has worked at the Times for over 33 years. Cohen’s piece, "A Shaken Israel Is Forced Back to Its Eternal Dilemma," suggested Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was fatally distracted.
"The most sweeping invasion of Israeli territory in decades, conducted by a Hamas force that had been widely seen as a ragtag collection of militants, has delivered a psychological shock to Israel so great that its very foundations are being questioned: its army, its intelligence services, its government and its capacity to control the millions of Palestinians in its midst," Cohen wrote. "As with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, disbelief has mingled with anger at a colossal intelligence failure."
Rindsberg said the piece is "blaming the victim," but feels it’s simply par for the course when it comes to the Times.
"This is just the beginning, just like a military operation. It'll start with phase one, it’ll proceed to phase two. By phase three, we're going to start getting full-blown hit pieces where Israel is being blamed for basically every moral wrong for the murder of children…. whatever The New York Times can pull out of its hat, it absolutely is going to do that," he said.
ISRAELI MILITARY OFFICIAL SHOWS SCENE OF HAMAS TERROR ATTACK: THIS WAS A 'PLANNED MASSACRE'
A spokesperson for The New York Times vehemently defended the paper’s coverage of the deadly Hamas terror attack on Israel. (REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo)
The Times is not the only American media organization to face scrutiny for coverage of the Hamas attack against Israel. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt chided MSNBC on Monday, bluntly asking while appearing on the network, "Who's writing the scripts?"
"MSNBC has become a mouthpiece for the radical left in the U.S. and around the world as well," Rindsberg said.
"The whole purpose is to try to yank the conversation as far to the left and to radicalize the conversation to whatever extent possible. And it's really becoming naked. I mean, we just had Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL on MSNBC telling one of their hosts how shocked he was by the language, by the fact that they're referring to terrorists as fighters," Rindsberg continued. "These are not fighters. That strips all of the moral charge from the terminology. And again, what it's trying to do is sanitize what happened in Israel. What actually happened, we know, is a massacre perpetrated by terrorists against civilians."
MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rindsberg said the Israeli people are well aware that American media outlets don’t always take their side, even when the opposition is pure evil.
"They're on the same page as all the rest of us when it comes to the mainstream media, which is that the bias is just -- it's so obvious. It's no longer cloaked; it's no longer hidden. We all know it for what it is. Israelis see the same exact thing," he said.
On Sunday, the ADL leader also criticized some U.S. media outlets' treatment of the terror attack, in a blistering thread on X.
"Commentators must stop dignifying them as ‘militants’ and stop lauding their crimes as ‘spectacular’ – they are agents of death with an agenda of savagery and there is no excuse for those who apologize for their crimes or glorify their actions," Greenblatt wrote.
"There are some issues in public life that might prompt impassioned debate, then there are moments of unmistakable moral clarity that demand unequivocal, universal condemnation. This is one of those moments. It is good vs. evil," he continued. "That’s it."
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Fox News’ Kristine Parks and Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
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