“We do come under intense scrutiny and often are accused of having a bias in favor of one side or another,” says New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ( 12/2/25)—which in his mind seems to prove they’re doing a fine job.
Last week, a sentence stopped me in my tracks. It was embedded in a question posed by Patrick Healy, New York Times assistant managing editor, to his boss, executive editor Joe Kahn.
The duo’s back-and-forth (New York Times, 12/2/25)—in which Healy synthesized readers’ questions, and also asked Kahn a few of his own—offered readers a look at how the Times covers the issues of the day.
Halfway through a meandering question on Gaza, Healy said: “Some critics say we’re mouthpieces for Hamas.” Wait, what?
Only a handful of zealots fit this bill, and maybe the most conspicuous example—the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA)—has a familial tie to Kahn.
Was Healy gaslighting readers? I wondered. Or was he about to disclose Kahn’s tie to readers? (Spoiler: he didn’t; nor did Kahn.)
‘Dissected newspaper coverage’
CAMERA billboard likening the New York Times to Hamas.
CAMERA is a group dedicated to attacking news outlets critical of Israel. Its research methods have been criticized as slipshod and agenda-driven (Extra!, 3–4/01; Electronic Intifada, 8/24/09). “CAMERA’s story is an un-nuanced, hard-line version of Mideast history in which Israel can do no wrong,” the American Prospect (5/1/08) observed, writing about the group’s efforts to surreptitiously edit Wikipedia articles on Israel/Palestine.
The Forward (11/29/19) has included it among groups “known for intimidation and smear campaigns against scholars and students whose views they oppose.” It has backed efforts to plant informants in college classrooms to monitor for “bias” (Electronic Intifada, 4/29/10).
And for over a decade, it has plastered a billboard across the street from the Times’ office, which it uses to attack the Times, even going so far as to compare the paper to Hamas: “Hamas attacks Israel: Not surprising. The New York Times attacks Israel: Also not surprising.”
Far from recoiling at CAMERA’s extremism, Kahn’s late father, Leo Kahn, embraced the group, serving on its board for nearly two decades. As the billionaire co-founder of the office supplies company Staples, Leo Kahn was also presumably a donor to CAMERA, helping underwrite the group’s attacks, including on his own son’s employer.
Meanwhile, father and son “often dissected newspaper coverage,” the Times (4/19/22) noted in a profile of Joe Kahn, upon his being named executive editor in 2022.
‘Engagement and mastery’
“It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of October 7,” the New York Times decreed (Intercept, 4/15/24), but the paper “set a high bar for allowing others to use [‘genocide’] as an accusation.”
Leo Kahn died in 2011, well before his son was elevated to the Times’ top job, but it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be proud of Joe’s handiwork.
Under Joe, the Times has ignored the conclusions of UN agencies, human rights groups and others by refusing to call Israel’s two-year-plus destruction of Gaza a genocide.
Other terms such as “ethnic cleansing” and “Palestine” are also discouraged in Kahn’s newsroom, according to an internal Times memo leaked to the Intercept (4/15/24).
Meanwhile, even as Kahn was clamping down on the newsroom, he offered praise to then-President Joe Biden for backing Israel’s genocide.
Biden has shown “a degree of engagement and mastery over some of the details of foreign policy,” Kahn said in May 2024, citing as an example Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide, then in its seventh month.
‘Some sort of genetic reason’
Joe Kahn told Semafor (5/5/24) that raising the issue of his father’s involvement with CAMERA was “a backhanded way of saying, ‘His father was Jewish.’”
When Semafor (5/5/24) (gently) asked Joe Kahn whether his father’s views on Israel may have influenced his own, he cried antisemitism:
[To] raise doubts implicitly about the integrity of somebody, based on their parent—the implication there would be that there’s some sort of genetic reason why I would be partial to Israel. So yeah, I think there is some implication of race.
“My father did what he did,” Kahn continued. “By the time that I was in journalism, he wasn’t active at all.”
But Kahn’s journalism career began in 1987, three years before his father joined CAMERA’s board.
By the time Kahn joined the Times in 1998, his dad had already served on CAMERA’s board for eight years. And Leo Kahn would remain there for another decade, even as his son climbed the Times’ ladder.
“As late as 2008, the year Joe Kahn was promoted to editor on the [Times] foreign desk, Leo Kahn was listed on CAMERA’s board of directors,” the Intercept (1/28/24) reported.
Keeping the world at bay
FAIR’s Owen Schacht (10/7/24): “The Times’ prized cover story was built on shaky foundations, with the paper dismissing assurances from hospitals and hotlines that they had gotten no reports of sexual violence, relying instead on politicized sources with a record of debunked atrocity claims.”
Maybe most egregiously, under Kahn, the Times front-paged dubious Israeli claims about the October 7 attack, specifically that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war (Intercept, 1/28/24; FAIR.org, 10/7/24).
The Times story (12/28/23) was published two and a half months after October 7, at a pivotal moment when Israel’s war on Gaza might have been brought to an early end, with global opinion rapidly turning against Israel over its brutal response. But the Times’ front-page story helped keep the world at bay, buying Israel time to continue its genocide.
Two years later, the Times has updated, but not retracted its story—which Kahn hailed.
At some point, the Times will have to offer a mea culpa for its complicity in Israel’s genocide (as it did with the Iraq War—5/26/04). Until then, readers will have to make do with being gaslit.
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