A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri

“After He Ran a Cartoon on the War in Gaza, Gannett Fired Him,” is the headline the New York Times put over its recent report about the Palm Beach Post firing an editorial page editor.

The headline, sympathetic to the ousted editor, set the tone for the whole article. The Times dispatch, though delivered in the disguise of an objective news article, sided clearly with the fired editor instead of with the local Jewish community or the newspaper’s ownership. A more accurate headline might have been, “After He Ran an Antisemitic Cartoon Depicting a Released Israeli Hostage as Trampling on the Bloody Corpses of ‘Over 40,000 Palestinians,’ Gannett Fired Him.”

The Times article was by Benjamin Mullin, a reporter who covers the media industry. Had the Times chosen to assign the piece to a reporter on the Israel beat, or one who covers antisemitism (which would be a worthwhile beat for the Times to establish, and especially timely since there’s a new Trump administration and the newspaper has a previous pattern of suddenly discovering a new concern about antisemitism when Republicans are in power), the result might have been different.

The headline was just one of many ways in which the Times signaled its slant on this story.

The article referred to “a local Jewish group that claimed the cartoon was antisemitic.” It wasn’t just “a local Jewish group.” It was the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, which is the central umbrella institution of the local organized Jewish community. “Claimed” is a loaded verb. Even the Times‘ own stylebook acknowledges that “claim is not a neutral synonym for say. It means assert a right or contend something that may be open to question.”

Nor was it only the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County that called the cartoon antisemitic. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis also described the cartoon as antisemitic, noting that it “trivialized the plight of Israeli hostages and promoted antisemitic tropes of Israeli bloodlust.”

The Times could have published the cartoon itself and let the readers judge for themselves. Instead, it used a hyperlink and a bowdlerized text description of the drawing. The Times said, “The image shows two Israeli soldiers rescuing a hostage captured by Hamas. Under the words ‘Some Israeli hostages are home after over a year of merciless war,’ one of the soldiers says, ‘Watch your step’ as he, the rescued hostage and the other soldier walk through a mass of bodies with the label ‘over 40,000 Palestinians killed.'”

That description omitted one of the most outrageous aspects of the cartoon: that the Palestinian bodies were colored red, as if drenched in blood.

The Times description also omitted that one Israeli soldier was toting a machine gun, portraying the Israeli military — not the terrorist group Hamas, which was invisible and not present in the cartoon — as culpable for all the killing. The Palestinians were all depicted as unarmed, notwithstanding that “upwards of 17,000” of Gazans killed are said by Andrew Fox to have been “Hamas and affiliated combatants.”

The Times reported that the editor, Tony Doris, “said in an interview last week that the cartoon was antiwar, not antisemitic.” Yet if the cartoon was “antiwar,” why demonize only the Israeli soldiers while ignoring that Hamas is also waging war and began the present conflict by invading Israel and seizing hostages on Oct. 7, 2023? Opposing only Israel’s war and not Hamas’s isn’t antiwar; it’s anti-Israel. It suggests a double standard for Israel that is not only consistent with bias against Jews but also meets the definition of antisemitism used by the US government.

The Times didn’t seem to push or challenge the fired editor on that point; it just parroted his point of view.

As is frequent in these cases, the Times trotted out the ancestry of one of the protagonists as a supposed defense against the antisemitism charge. The Times reported, “In an interview on Saturday, he rejected the idea that the cartoon was antisemitic, saying it was simply a case of, ‘this war’s gone on long enough.’ [The cartoonist, Jeff] Danziger, an Army veteran whose father is Jewish, also said that his service as an intelligence officer has made him critical of war.” The Times told us that Danziger’s “father is Jewish,” as if that is relevant somehow, but it didn’t say what religion Danziger is, if he has any. Why was the father’s religion or Jewish status worth including but not Danziger’s own, or lack of it?

Back in 2019, after a firestorm of condemnation, the Times’ own headline said, “Times Apologizes for Publishing Anti-Semitic Cartoon.”

Back then, Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote of “the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry. So long as anti-Semitic arguments or images are framed, however speciously, as commentary about Israel, there will be a tendency to view them as a form of political opinion, not ethnic prejudice.”

Sadly, six years later, the Times is still committing the same mistakes, this time in reporting on the cartoon controversy at the paper in Palm Beach.

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.