Jewish Newspaper Editor Cancels His New York Times Subscription, Calling Israel Coverage ‘Dangerous’

A longtime New York newspaper editor has publicly canceled his New York Times subscription after 60 years, citing “consistent misrepresentations” about Israel that are “dangerous” and “debilitating toward the quest for truth.”

The veteran journalist, Ed Weintrob, was previously the editor of the Brooklyn Paper and is now the editor and publisher of The Jewish Star newspaper on Long Island. Weintrob is hardly a knee-jerk critic of the New York Times — in fact, when much of the Jewish community was up in arms against the Times for its investigative criticism of Jewish schools, Weintrob fronted a defense of the Times coverage by Jonathan Tobin, headlining it, “Tobin: Even lying Times got this right.”

In a May 3 social media post, Weintrob posted a screenshot of the cancellation form on the New York Times website, with the box ticked that listed as a reason, “I have concerns about the New York Times‘ coverage.”

In the explanation field on the form, Weintrob wrote, “A lifelong subscriber (and a journalist for nearly 50 years) I’ve approached the cancel button many times but never hit the trigger. The NYT, while not perfect, could usually be relied on to seemingly attempt honest coverage of key issues.”

The editor went on to tell the Times: “Your consistent misrepresentations toward Israel are at best cartoonish, at worst dangerous, and in all events debilitating to the quest for truth.”

To his social media audience, Weintrob explained, “Pushing that ‘cancel’ button was hard, but doing it was long overdue … It’s a cold-turkey break to a 60 year addiction (yes, I’ve been reading the NY Times print edition that long.”

Weintrob has plenty of company in deciding he no longer wants the print New York Times in his home. On May 8, the New York Times Company announced that print subscription revenues had declined, notwithstanding price increases, and that the number of print subscribers had dropped to 640,000 in the first quarter of 2024 from 710,000 in the first quarter of 2023, a nearly ten percent decline in a single year.

The paper has seen some digital growth, but news-only digital subscriptions have also dropped off, leaving it unclear whether the company’s customers are paying for New York Times news and opinion or for the wordgames, cooking recipe library, and “Athletic” sports publication.

Remaining Times readers looking for evidence of Weintrob’s claims of a departure from the truth will have no problem finding it in the Times. For example, a Times article about a clash between anti-Israel (the Times insists on describing them as “pro-Palestinian,” as if allowing Hamas to remain in power in Gaza would be good for Palestinians) and pro-Israel demonstrators in Los Angeles concludes with this passage, relying on “Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University”:

The views of many of the young people demonstrating this week were shaped, he said, by knowing only Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister of Israel.

“All these students have seen is Netanyahu and a government there that to them seems autocratic, out of touch and not protecting democratic ideals,” Mr. Guerra said.

That’s a falsehood. In fact, Ehud Olmert was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, Naftali Bennett from 2021 to 2022, and Yair Lapid for six months in 2022. And the young people are being supported by professors, professional activists, grantmakers, and older graduate students who also have lived through other Israeli leaders.

As for “not protecting democratic ideals,” Israel has had five national elections since 2019. In contrast, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, was elected in 2005 to a four-year term as president of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas is in the 19th year of a four-year presidential term, and the anti-Israel protesters think Netanyahu is the autocrat?

Likewise, a Times magazine piece about Issa Amro, who the Times describes as a nonviolent Palestinian activist, reports, “In 2010, the year Amro received a Human Rights Defender of the Year award from the United Nations, a civilian flotilla carrying humanitarian aid approached a beach on the Gaza Strip and was met by Israeli commandos who boarded its flagship and killed nine of its crew. In this conflict, nonviolence would be no shield from violence.” The phrase “civilian flotilla carrying humanitarian aid” is just an outrageously misleading description of a convoy of terrorist-sympathizers carrying camouflage netting and aspiring for martyrdom.

I’d probably join Weintrob and cancel too, if I didn’t need to read the darn thing for this press criticism column.

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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