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Newsroom leaders, concerned that some Times journalists are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests to coverage decisions, are seeking to draw a line. 

Kahn noted that the organization has added a lot of digital-savvy workers who are skilled in areas like data analytics, design and product engineering but who weren’t trained in independent journalism. He also suggested that colleges aren’t preparing new hires to be tolerant of dissenting views

International editor Philip Pan later intervened, saying the WhatsApp thread—at its worst a “tense forum where the questions and comments can feel accusatory”—should be for sharing information, not for hosting debates, according to messages reviewed by the Journal. 

Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has become particularly fraught at the Times, with some reporters saying the Times’s work is tilting in favor of Israel and others pushing back forcefully, say people familiar with the situation. That has led to dueling charges of bias and journalistic malpractice among reporters and editors, forcing management to referee disputes.

“Just like our readers at the moment, there are really really strong passions about that issue and not that much willingness to really explore the perspectives of people who are on the other side of that divide,” Kahn said, adding that it’s hard work for staffers “to put their commitment to the journalism often ahead of their own personal views.”

Last fall, Times staffers covering the war got into a heated dispute in a WhatsApp group chat over the publication’s reporting on Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, which Israel alleged was a command-and-control center for Hamas.

While the Guild represents staffers across many major U.S. news outlets, its members also include employees from non-news advocacy organizations such as pro-Palestinian group Jewish Voice For Peace, Democratic Socialists of America and divisions of the ACLU. 

“Young adults who are coming up through the education system are less accustomed to this sort of open debate, this sort of robust exchange of views around issues they feel strongly about than may have been the case in the past,” he said, adding that the onus is on the Times to instill values like independence in its employees.

The publisher of the Times, 43-year-old A.G. Sulzberger, says readers’ trust is at risk, however. Some journalists, including at the Times, are criticizing journalistic traditions like impartiality, while embracing “a different model of journalism, one guided by personal perspective and animated by personal conviction,” Sulzberger wrote in a 12,000-word essay last year in Columbia Journalism Review. 

Despite such moves, NewsGuard, an organization that rates credibility of news sites, in February reduced the Times’s score from the maximum of 100 to 87.5, saying it doesn’t have a clear enough delineation between news and opinion.

Emboldened by their show of strength on Bennet, employees would flex their muscles again on multiple occasions, pushing to oust colleagues they felt had engaged in journalistic or workplace misconduct. 

One thing Powell noticed, he said, was that coverage that challenged popular political and cultural beliefs was being neglected. Powell’s work includes a story on MIT’s canceling of a lecture by an academic who had criticized affirmative action, and another examining whether the ACLU is more willing to defend the First Amendment rights of progressives than far-right groups.

Kahn, who succeeded Baquet as executive editor in June 2022, and Opinion Editor Kathleen Kingsbury said in a letter to staff that they wouldn’t tolerate participation by Times journalists in protests or attacks on colleagues.

Divisions have formed in the newsroom over the role of the union that represents Times staffers, the NewsGuild-CWA. Some staffers say it has inappropriately inserted itself into debates with management, including over coverage of the trans community and the war. 

The Times isn’t the only news organization where employees have become more vocal in complaints about coverage and workplace practices. War coverage has also fueled tensions at The Wall Street Journal, with some reporters in meetings and internal chat groups complaining that coverage is skewed—either favoring Israel or Palestinians.  

When Times staffers logged on to a union virtual meeting last fall to discuss whether to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, some attendees from other organizations had virtual backgrounds displaying Palestinian flags. The meeting, where a variety of members were given around two minutes to share their views on the matter, felt like the kind of rally the Times’ policy prohibits, according to attendees. 

In January, Sulzberger shared his thoughts on covering Trump during a visit to the Washington bureau. It was imperative to keep Trump coverage emotion-free, he told staffers, according to people who attended. He referenced the Times story, “Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” by Charlie Savage, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, as a good example of fact-based and fair coverage. 

Documenta was a very big moment for artists on this issue. Everyone started getting very afraid. What we’ve been experiencing is a gap between the cultural establishment and the political structures that fund the culture scene.

I have a lot of Palestinian friends. A lot of Israeli friends. A lot of

friends with an immigrant background. My whole community was just paralyzed by fear and hopelessness and this feeling of being humiliated, denigrated, dehumanized.

I have lost my faith in German media. I never had faith in German politics, but now I really have no hope for German politics. Honestly, I think what I still feel connected to are the people who tell me privately: “I agree with you, but if I say it, I lose my job.”

Israelis pursue happiness through family and community, by feeling rooted and having a sense of purpose. My son Yoni got married in Jerusalem midwar, while serving in the military reserves. He notes that “Israelis grow up with many outside influences, many adult role models, not just their parents. It starts with our large weddings, when you’re blessed to ‘build a faithful home in Israel.’ ”

Alexis de Tocqueville called families the backbone of healthy democracies. Family inculcates loyalty, commitment and self-sacrifice. Belonging to communities—extended families—teaches citizens to care about and cooperate with others.

Despite disagreeing passionately, Israelis live in an intimate society that runs on trust and generates hope. Israelis feel they’re never alone, and that their relatives and friends will never abandon them.

Living in what Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, called Altneuland, old-new land, Israelis don’t count in days and decades but in millennia and eternity. They feel part of a bigger story, Jews’ historical saga reaching back 3,500 years.

The pain punctuating this story helps transcend passing traumas. Even as most Israelis experienced Hamas’s Oct. 7 killing spree as a Jewish event, powered by centuries of Jew-hatred, Israelis recall many redemptive moments too. Israelis’ favorite holidays, including Hanukkah, Passover, and Independence Day, re-enact this reassuring oppression-to-liberation arc.

Compare anti-Israel progressive students with their Israeli soldier peers. Many protesters are the avatars of America’s lost generation. Their pinched ideology deems the U.S. systemically racist and is intent on sorting everyone by “gender identity” and skin color. Rather than optimistically expand America’s economy for all, they pessimistically compete for reparations and indulgences—their “restorative justice” is often more vengeful than just.

These illiberal liberals trash traditional families, religion and America’s noble story of a flawed nation becoming “a more perfect union.” These campus commissars are among the unhappy Americans the surgeon general sees in the depths of loneliness and despair.

Israelis didn’t seek this war—but when attacked, they unleashed a patriotism, idealism, self-sacrifice and grit that today’s regressive progressives scorn. Israelis’ resilience, duty and love of life explain how this often polarized and besieged society remains such a happy place

Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:

Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.

Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.

[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.

This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.

Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:

Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.

And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.

The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.

The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.

The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.

And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.

The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.

“What Putin wants is to transform the world order” that evolved since World War II and the post-Cold War — where “the competition between nations was about who can be richer and who can help their people prosper the most . … Putin hates that world because he loses in that world — his system is a loser in a peaceful, global, wealth-enhancing paradigm. And so what he wants is to move us back to dog-eat-dog, to a 19th-century, great power competition, because he thinks he can, if not win, be more effective there. … Let’s not think that this is a Ukrainian problem; this is a problem for us all.”

These wars very much are our business — and now clearly inescapable, since we’re deeply entwined in both conflicts. What’s crucial to keep in mind about America — as the leader of the Inclusion Network — is that right now we’re fighting the war in Ukraine on our terms, but we’re fighting the war in the Middle East on Iran’s terms.

CNN recently described, per a source familiar with it, a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment provided to Congress saying that Russia had lost 87 percent of its preinvasion active-duty ground troops and two-thirds of its tanks that it had prior to its invasion of Ukraine. Putin can still inflict a lot of damage on Ukraine with missiles, but his dream of occupying the whole country and using it as a launching pad to threaten the Inclusion Network — particularly the NATO-protected European Union — is now out of reach. Thank you, Kyiv.

At a breakfast with NATO leaders devoted to the Ukraine issue at Davos this year, Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, noted that it is we, the West, who should be thanking the Ukrainians, not forcing them to beg us for more weapons.

China under President Xi Jinping straddles the two networks, along with much of what’s come to be called the global south. Their hearts, and often pocketbooks, are with the Resistors but their heads are with the Includers

the Resistance Network “is orchestrated by Iran, Islamists and jihadists” in a process they refer to as the “unity of battlefields.” This network, he noted, “seeks to bridge militias, rejectionists, religious sects and sectarian leaders,” creating an anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western axis that can simultaneously pressure Israel in Gaza, in the West Bank and on the Lebanon border — as well as America in the Red Sea, in Syria and in Iraq and Saudi Arabia from all directions.

In stark contrast, Koteich said, stands the Inclusion Network, one that’s focused on “weaving together” global and regional markets instead of battlefronts, business conferences, news organizations, elites, hedge funds, tech incubators and major trade routes. This inclusion network, he added, “transcends traditional boundaries, creating a web of economic and technological interdependence that has the potential to redefine power structures and create new paradigms of regional stability.”

things are different in the Middle East. There, it is Iran that is sitting back comfortably — indirectly at war with Israel and America, and sometimes Saudi Arabia, by fighting through Tehran’s proxies: Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and Shiite militias in Iraq.

Iran is reaping all the benefits and paying virtually no cost for the work of its proxies, and the U.S., Israel and their tacit Arab allies have not yet manifested the will or the way to pressure Iran back — without getting into a hot war, which they all want to avoid.

The members of the Resistance Network are great at tearing down and breaking stuff, but, unlike the Inclusion Network, they have shown no capacity to build any government or society to which anyone would want to emigrate, let alone emulate

For all of these reasons, this is a moment of great peril as well as great opportunity — especially for Israel. The competition between the Resistance Network and the Inclusion Network means that the region has never been more hostile or more hospitable to accepting a Jewish state.

there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.

countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.

There are many examples of how economic and political powers manipulated the historical record to their own ends. Stalin purged disloyal comrades from history by executing them — and then altering photographic records to make it appear as if they never existed

Slovenia, upon becoming an independent country in 1992, “erased” over 18,000 people from the registry of residents — mainly members of the Roma minority and other ethnic non-Slovenes. In many cases, the government destroyed their physical records, leading to their loss of homes, pensions, and access to other services, according to a 2003 report by the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights.

The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903, purported to be meeting minutes from a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. First discredited in August 1921, as a forgery plagiarized from multiple unrelated sources, the Protocols featured prominently in Nazi propaganda, and have long been used to justify antisemitic violence, including a citation in Article 32 of Hamas’s 1988 founding Covenant.

In 1924, the Zinoviev Letter, said to be a secret communiqué from the head of the Communist International in Moscow to the Communist Party of Great Britain to mobilize support for normalizing relations with the Soviet Union, was published by The Daily Mail four days before a general election. The resulting scandal may have cost Labour the election.

As it becomes easier to generate historical disinformation, and as the sheer volume of digital fakes explodes, the opportunity will become available to reshape history, or at least to call our current understanding of it into question.

Decades later Operation Infektion — a Soviet disinformation campaign — used forged documents to spread the idea that the United States had invented H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, as a biological weapon.

Fortunately, a path forward has been laid by the same companies that created the risk.

In indexing a large share of the world’s digital media to train their models, the A.I. companies have effectively created systems and databases that will soon contain all of humankind’s digitally recorded content, or at least a meaningful approximation of it.

They could start work today to record watermarked versions of these primary documents, which include newspaper archives and a wide range of other sources, so that subsequent forgeries are instantly detectable.

many of the intellectual property concerns around providing a searchable online archive do not apply to creating watermarked and time-stamped versions of documents, because those versions need not be made publicly available to serve their purpose. One can compare a claimed document to the recorded archive by using a mathematical transformation of the document known as a “hash,” the same technique the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, uses to help companies screen for known terrorist content.

creating verified records of historical documents can be valuable for the large A.I. companies. New research suggests that when A.I. models are trained on A.I.-generated data, their performance quickly degrades. Thus separating what is actually part of the historical record from newly created “facts” may be critical.

Preserving the past will also mean preserving the training data, the associated tools that operate on it and even the environment that the tools were run in.

Such a vellum will be a powerful tool. It can help companies to build better models, by enabling them to analyze what data to include to get the best content, and help regulators to audit bias and harmful content in the models