For a telltale indicator of New York Times bias, keep an eye on the adjectives and adverbs.

Two recent front-page Times articles offer examples of this particular problem skewing the coverage.

A Times article purporting to show how Israelis “feel little sympathy” for Gazans suffering includes the line, “Michael Zigdon, who operates a small food shack in Netivot’s rundown market and had employed two men from Gaza until the attack, expressed little sympathy for Gazans, who have endured a ferocious Israeli military onslaught for the past eight months.”

The “ferocious” adjective gets hurled by the Times a second time in the same article, which goes on, in case any reader failed to absorb the point the first time, to say that “the death toll in Gaza has spiraled to at least 37,000 since Israel began its ferocious offensive.”

The Israeli self-defense operation gets described by the Times as “ferocious,” while the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 earns no such label. My Webster’s Second defines ferocious as “having or exhibiting ferocity, cruelty, savagery, etc; violently cruel.” Ferocity is defined as coming from the Latin root ferus, meaning wild, “as the ferocity of barbarians.”

That qualifies as slander of Israel, opinion masquerading as New York Times news writing. If the Times news writers and editors want to accuse Israel of waging barbaric, savage, wild, violently cruel warfare against Gazans, they are welcome to make a factual case for that. I think they’d have a hard time of it, given all the evidence about the care that Israel has used to limit noncombatant casualties. But making the accusation in a backhanded, backdoor way by sprinkling tendentious adjectives into news articles is a kind of deception so subtle that a lot of Times readers might not even notice it.

Usually the Times gets faulted for false moral equivalence between the Hamas terrorists and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) defending the Jewish state. In this case, there’s no equivalence; there’s just a straight-out smear of the Israelis as “ferocious” with no parallel negative description of the Gazan attackers.

In the same article, Israel’s government gets labeled as “hawkish” and “right-wing,” while no such descriptions are applied to Hamas or the remaining government of Gaza.

The Times is similarly ferocious in its description of a pro-Israel philanthropist and political donor, Dr. Miriam Adelson. A front-page article about her declares: “She is, in some ways, a political carbon copy of her husband: intensely pro-Israel, rabidly partisan, and a believer in the nobility of using her money, north of $30 billion, and her media empire to buy influence and shape the world.”

“Rabidly partisan?” It’s not enough for the rabid partisans at the Times to call Adelson partisan; they need to escalate it to “rabidly” partisan? The Times published a profile of a pro-Biden Democratic political donor, Jeffrey Katzenberg, without calling him rabid.

Rabid, ferocious — the Times can’t seem to write about Israeli-Americans or Israel without insulting them. It comes after another recent Times article that called Israel’s military response “aggressive” while applying no such descriptor to the Hamas Oct. 7 attack or to the many subsequent rocket launches and missile and drone attacks against Israel by Iran and its proxies.

Some rabid Times editor might want to consider an aggressive crackdown on the adjectives and adverbs or risk the Times further eroding what little remains of its reputation for journalistic impartiality.

The American Jewish community is already increasingly losing patience with the paper. The CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York, a longtime partner of the New York Times in its Neediest Cases Fund, Eric Goldstein, wrote a letter to the editor of the paper faulting the Adelson profile and a Times online headline that said US Rep. Jamaal Bowman had been “Overtaken by Flood of Pro-Israel Money.”

“Not only does it feed a dreadful antisemitic stereotype, it does a disservice to voters in [New York’s] 16th Congressional District who made their voices heard, loud and clear. Equally troubling was the Times‘ recent A1 profile of pro-Israel advocate Miriam Adelson, which played upon those same stereotypes,” Goldstein’s letter said. It faulted the Times for “bias.”

Likewise, the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Abraham Foxman, called the Bowman headline “crude, biased, and disgusting.” In another social media post, Foxman wrote, “NYTimes you are so obsessed with criticizing Israel that it distorts your news judgment.”

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.

 

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