More than 300 writers, scholars and cultural figures, including nearly 150 past New York Times contributors, have announced they will no longer write for the paper’s Opinion section, accusing it of helping to sanitize Israel’s war on Gaza.
The boycott, published Monday under the title “Genocide Isn't a Matter of Opinion,” as an open letter and public statement, demands three actions from the Times: a newsroom review of what the group calls “decades of biased, racist reportage on Palestine”; the retraction of the paper’s “widely debunked” investigation “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”; and a formal editorial call for a US arms embargo on Israel.
The statement was signed by a wide array of prominent figures, including Irish novelist Sally Rooney, US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, and activist Greta Thunberg. They were joined by Egyptian-British filmmaker Omar Robert Hamilton historian Rashid Khalidi, and Palestinian-French politician Rima Hassan. Crucially, the list also features physician and Nazi Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté, and journalists Abubaker Abed and Ahmed Alnaouq, who are survivors of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
“Over the past few years, the Times has increasingly turned to guest essayists to help repair its crumbling reputation,” the statement reads. “Without their diverse, often tokenized, perspectives, the Opinion section would be utterly worthless.”
The signatories say they are “refusing complicity” with what they describe as the newspaper’s “institutional role in manufacturing consent for mass slaughter, torture, and displacement.”
“As much as any weapons manufacturer, the media is part of the machinery of war, producing the impunity and bigotry that enable and sustain it,” the statement says. “There is no US newspaper more influential than The New York Times… and it uniquely shapes elite consensus on US foreign policy. Historically, this consensus has been fatal: Iran, 1953. Iraq, 2003. Libya, 2011.”
The letter cites the late Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat, killed by an Israeli airstrike earlier this year, who wrote: “Language makes genocide justifiable. A reason why we are still being bombed after 243 days is because of The New York Times and most Western media.”
Signatories accuse the paper of “reprinting outright lies from Israeli officials,” “withholding or amending coverage at the behest of the Israeli consulate,” and directing reporters to avoid words such as “slaughter,” “ethnic cleansing,” and “occupied territory.” The newsroom, they add, has “purged Arab and Muslim employees through a racially targeted witch hunt.”
They also condemn what they call the “social gathering” logic of the Times’ opinion pages, a “dinner party” of conflicting views that, they argue, treats genocide as a topic for polite debate.
“There is nothing appetizing or enlivening about the prospect of sitting across from the likes of Bret Stephens or Thomas Friedman, politely debating the definition of genocide,” the letter says.
The groups behind the boycott also include organizations such as Writers Against the War on Gaza, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and the Democratic Socialists of America. They argue that only by withholding their labor can writers ‘decenter and delegitimize’ the Times as the so-called paper of record.
They frame the protest as part of a larger reckoning inside Western media. “Allowing the most damning facts on the ground, like Israel’s systematic sniping of children, to be presented exclusively as a matter of opinion is journalistic malpractice,” the statement reads.
The boycott follows months of public protest over coverage of Gaza. In November 2023, demonstrators flooded the Times’ Manhattan headquarters, chanting “Free Palestine” and distributing a spoof broadsheet titled The New York War Crimes, listing thousands of Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes.
The boycott statement also criticized “Screams Without Words” for relying on unnamed sources to allege systematic sexual assaults by Hamas, saying the claims were unverified and fueled genocide propaganda.
A January 2024 investigation by The Intercept found that CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News also aired false or misleading reports in the early weeks of the war. Across mainstream Western outlets, from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, the pattern was similar Israeli government claims were repeated as fact, while Palestinian voices were marginalized or erased.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least 68,527 Palestinians have been killed and 170,395 wounded since Israel’s genocide began on Oct. 7, 2023.
