{"id":409502,"date":"2026-09-24T18:38:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T18:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/409502\/"},"modified":"2026-09-24T18:38:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T18:38:27","slug":"florida-sues-ny-times-over-alleged-anti-israel-bias-demands-internal-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/409502\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida sues NY Times over alleged anti-Israel bias; demands internal records"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ExteriorThe New York Times Building on the west side of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Credit: Tada Images\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/p>\n

The state of Florida filed a shareholder lawsuit<\/a> Wednesday against The New York Times in a Manhattan state trial court, arguing its coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict would harm shareholder value for the state\u2019s agencies and public sector retirees.<\/p>\n

The named plaintiff is the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA), which oversees more than $276 billion in assets for state and local government entities. Along with the National Center for Public Policy Research, the suit asks a judge to force the Times\u2019 board of directors to hand over internal records pertaining to the paper\u2019s coverage of the events.<\/p>\n

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said during a press conference in Miami-Dade County that the state was not suing the Times because of a specific news article or editorial discretion, but over corporate governance, saying that as a publicly traded company the newspaper holds \u201clegal responsibilities and duties to your shareholders.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Florida SBA invests and administers its assets and owes fiduciary duties to more than 1.2 million members and beneficiaries. It holds 161, 375 shares of Times stock.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the paper said it would fight the request for internal records.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose,\u201d said Charlie Stadtlander, executive director for media relations and communications for the Times.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company\u2019s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment. We will defend against the suit vigorously.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawsuit comes about six weeks after the attorney general sent a\u00a028-page letter<\/a>\u00a0to Times executives, questioning the accuracy of news articles going back several years, declaring they were \u201cpublicly documented failures.\u201d<\/p>\n

He requested records showing whether and how the paper\u2019s board of directors have been briefed about specific news stories, most notably a May column by Nicholas Kristof alleging Israel used dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.<\/p>\n

The Times never sent those documents. Attorneys for the paper said on Aug. 21 that the request \u201cdoes not serve a proper purpose and violates the First Amendment\u201d while constituting \u201ccoordinated harassment,\u201d according to the lawsuit.<\/p>\n

Records sought<\/p>\n

In a press release, the attorney general\u2019s office says that the SBA narrowed its request on Aug. 26 to board-level governance records from 2020 going forward, including:<\/p>\n

Any charter provision, escalation protocol, or reporting line by which editorial-standards compliance, journalistic accuracy, corrections practice, or defamation exposure reaches the board or a board committee.<\/p>\n

Board and committee agendas and calendars sufficient to show whether those subjects have appeared as agenda items.<\/p>\n

Versions of the audit committee charter and the company\u2019s editorial standards, and documents showing who approved them.<\/p>\n

The reporting line of the standards editor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe company\u2019s repeated publication of materially false or baseless factual assertions, many later admitted internally or disproven externally, supports a reasonable inference that the Board has not only failed in its obligation to monitor the Company\u2019s internal controls, but it has allowed such flagrantly selective application of the internal controls to support the conclusion that in the absence of any Board-level oversight, journalistic standards have been weaponized within the Company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors,\u201d the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n

As a publicly traded company, Uthmeier said, the Times bears legal duties to its shareholders.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd we saw some very dangerous trends that appeared to call into credibility the sound business sense of what that company is doing,\u201d he said. \u201cWe counted 72 recent errors where the company admitted in its own correction column in a very single coverage area in just eight months.\u00a0\u00a0All pro-Hamas-style reporting that had to be clawed back as incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Uthmeier added at one point that the Times had \u201cretracted\u201d the Kristof column, but there are no reports of the paper having done that. On May 21, Kathleen Kingsbury, the opinion editor of the Times, declared<\/a> that the paper stood by the column.<\/p>\n

Whistleblower<\/p>\n

The lawsuit relies on information from a whistleblower who raised concerns about the reporting of \u201cmany instances of anti-Israel bias.\u201d The suit says the whistleblower on at least 15 occasions raised concerns about broken editorial standards between 2019 and March 2026, when she left the paper.<\/p>\n

That whistleblower went on to say that \u201cthe staffers who engaged in public advocacy on the war in favor of Palestine, which she reported through the same channels, received, so far as she is aware, no such request to edit or delete their support,\u201d the lawsuit says.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit also notes the Times last month suffered its first defamation lawsuit loss in more than 50 years. That\u2019s when the U.S. District Court for the Northern Division of Alabama awarded $9.25 million dollars<\/a>\u00a0to a former University of Alabama basketball player named Kai Spears, because the paper had mistakenly placed him as a passenger in a car that was at the scene of a shooting death.<\/p>\n

Florida Phoenix<\/a> is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This article appears in Sept. 17 \u2013 23, 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The New York Times Building on the west side of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. Credit: Tada…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":409503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[8114,4260,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-409502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-florida-attorney-general-james-uthmeier","tag-james-uthmeier","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=409502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/409502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/409503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=409502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=409502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=409502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}