Members of the New York Times staff are divided over the legitimacy of a bombshell investigation into Hamas’s use of sexual violence on October 7, the Intercept reports. The investigation, published by the Times in December and written by Pulitzer Prize–winner Jeffrey Gettleman, with Anat Schwartz and described in graphic detail the accounts of Hamas’s use of rape, sexual violence, and assault against women.
One of NYT’s flagship podcasts, The Daily, was set to run an episode on the reporting on January 9, according to the Intercept. The Times reportedly pulled the episode “amid a furious internal debate about the strength of the paper’s original reporting on the subject.” The still-unaired episode was restructured to include caveats and an air of “uncertainty.”
Gettleman, Schwartz, and Sella spent “several weeks and conducted 150 interviews to report on how Hamas weaponized sexual violence during the October 7th attack,” executive editor Joe Kahn said in an email sent to the Times newsroom. But, the Intercept claims, one editorial staffer said that “the story deserved more fact-checking and much more reporting. All basic standards applied to countless other stories.”
Throughout the Israel–Hamas war, the Times has relied on unverified data from the Hamas-run health ministry for a death toll of Gaza residents. National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby told reporters in October: “If you’re going to report casualty figures out of Gaza, I would frankly recommend you don’t choose numbers put out by an organization that’s run by a terrorist organization.” The Times also falsely published a story blaming Israel for a strike on a Gaza hospital (the strike was the result of a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket). The story, editors said, “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.” Since the October 7 attack and the war it triggered, the Times has had opportunities to reevaluate its standards of responsible reporting and, especially, to prioritize its duty to alert readers if and when the paper publishes allegations instead of facts. (The report by Gettleman and his co-authors relied on “video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors”; many of the claims it investigated had been reported before, in less detail.)
The NYT has assigned Gettleman to write a follow-up story “to gather evidence supporting his original reporting,” the Intercept said.
If NYT staff did indeed revise a (still-unaired) podcast to question claims that its own reporters investigated, is this because Times editors believe that the original story may contain inaccuracies? Or is this internal rift driven by a staff uproar, similar to the Times newsroom’s duel over Senator Tom Cotton’s 2020 op-ed, in which Cotton argued that the federal government should mobilize troops in cities to combat violent protests? Times editors eventually caved to the staffers and said in a note that “we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.”
The Intercept also attempted a takedown of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, which the outlet claimed has unfairly influenced the Times’ reporting on Israel. CAMERA began in the 1980s to combat legacy media’s anti-Israel biases. Most notable at that time was the Washington Post‘s anti-Israel slant — a bias that, following Hamas’s October 7 attacks, has been “frequent and brazen,” as Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff reported for National Review last week.