The New York Times building in New York City. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A coalition of law firms representing a shareholder in the New York Times Company has demanded that the newspaper hand over its internal “books and records,” accusing its board of failing to rein in what the shareholder describes as systematically anti-Israel reporting.

The demand letter, sent on Tuesday and obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon, warns that unless the Times produces the requested documents by July 21, a lawsuit will be filed in the New York County Supreme Court in Manhattan. It was sent on behalf of the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a conservative think tank and beneficial shareholder in the company, by a group of lawyers that includes the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC) and two firms that joined the effort this week.

The shareholder says it wants to determine whether the Times board has “abdicated its basic oversight duties” by allowing the publication of articles that it claims promote anti-Israel narratives while shielding anti-Israel Democratic politicians — most prominently Graham Platner, the Maine Democratic Senate nominee, who withdrew from the race last week. NCPPR “seeks to investigate whether the Board is engaging in any form of oversight to ensure that the New York Times remains a news reporting agency worth anything to its stockholders, rather than becoming viewed by the public as a simple propaganda arm,” the letter states.

The letter’s central example is a pair of Times articles published two days apart. On March 4, the paper reported that Corinne Levy Goldman — wife of Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), who lost his Democratic primary in June — had “liked” roughly 10 pro-Israel and pro-Jewish social media posts, activity the Times said some viewed as “hateful or insensitive.” Two days later, it reported on the social media activity of Rama Duwaji, wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had “liked” Instagram posts after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The Times characterized those as supportive of the “Palestinian cause,” though critics — including Jewish Insider and the Free Beacon — said several of the posts celebrated or excused the attack. The headline on the Duwaji article was later revised and now says that Mamdani, after “social media scrutiny,” called his wife a “private person.”

“Ten likes made one spouse a headline for derision … celebrating a massacre made the other a ‘private person,'” the letter says. “A reporting standard that turns on the subject party’s politics is not a standard at all.”

The lawyers are demanding documents “sufficient to show what policies, if any, exist to ensure” that the paper’s “editorial standards are applied uniformly without regard to the political affiliation of a story’s subject.”

The letter also cites a May 11 column by Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” which alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces, including a claim that guards trained dogs to assault prisoners. The column was fiercely disputed: the Israeli government denounced it as defamatory and announced it would sue the Times, while critics alleged factual inaccuracies and said quoted sources claimed their words had been misrepresented. Between the Oct. 7 attack and June 7, 2024, the letter adds, the Times Company acknowledged 72 errors in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, all of which, it says, were unfavorable to Israel.

“A Board doing its job does not watch its company get caught, publicly and repeatedly, publishing material that violates the company’s own written standards, and say nothing,” the letter states.

On Platner, the letter argues the Times “sanitized” the candidate, accusing the paper of “downplaying or outright ignoring” newsworthy information — including “his Nazi tattoo and various prior statements indicating racism and disrespect for the United States government and members of the military.” Platner, who has said he was unaware of the tattoo’s significance, withdrew from the race after being accused of sexual assault, an allegation he denied. The Times has previously defended its Platner coverage.

This week’s letter follows an earlier demand the NJAC sent the Times Company on May 29 seeking access to internal records over the Kristof column, which the paper did not act on.

A Times spokesperson has rejected the effort, saying that although it is “framed as a corporate law demand,” it amounts to “a clear attempt to deter reporting protected by the First Amendment.”