If you want to know what’s wrong with the New York Times, look at what’s wrong with Harvard — or Ford.
The New York Times conceded in an embarrassing editors’ note that it screwed up its initial coverage of that explosion at the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza on October 17th, conceding that “early versions of the coverage — and the prominence it received in a headline, news alert, and social media channels — relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.
The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”
Hamas is a genocidal terrorist gang, and the Times is sucking its thumb about “how credible” its claims are when no serious person or organization would assign Hamas any credibility at all.
From time to time, the Times seems to need reminding that it is a newspaper — which is to say, its reporters and editors sometimes forget what a newspaper is for.
The Times is not the only institution that has that problem.
Elsewhere on the far edges of the Israel-Hamas conflict, elite universities such as Harvard and Penn are paying a price for their accommodating attitudes toward Hamas and their reflexive hostility toward Israel.
Follow along with The Post’s live blog for the latest on Hamas’ attack on Israel
Businessman Les Wexner, whose family has given more than $42 million to Harvard, is cutting off the school.
Apollo CEO Marc Rowan says he is closing his checkbook to Penn unless the president and the chairman of the board are dismissed.
When institutions lose confidence in the value of their core missions — journalism in the case of the New York Times, education in the case of Harvard — the leaders don’t tender their resignations: No, they go looking for a reason to keep those cushy positions.
Add to this the fact that bosses in these institutions — especially affluent white men on the wrong side of middle age — are terrified of being denounced (as racists, sexists, Islamophobes, whatever) by the sneering young Jacobins around them, and it is all too easy for these institutions to be bullied into adopting a parochial and often silly version of “social justice” as their core missions.
How celebrities, schools, and businesses have reacted to Hamas’ terror attack against Israel
- Colleges see clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters — here’s where major institutions stand
- Huda Beauty faces boycott calls after founder spurns ‘blood money’ from Israeli customers
- Top law firm rescinds job offers to Columbia, Harvard students over Israel letters
It is worth remembering that the Times chased out a senior editor for simply publishing a column by a U.S. senator when junior staffers protested and that its Israel coverage is written in part by an Israel-hating associate of antisemitic crackpot Rashida Tlaib, and that Ivy League schools have punished or dismissed tenured faculty (the Christakises at Yale, Joshua Katz at Princeton, etc.) on social-justice pretexts.
This sort of thing isn’t limited to controversies about the Middle East.
Ford’s electric vehicle division is going to lose about $4.5 billion of shareholders’ money this year — equal to about 40 percent of its pre-tax income — because of a voguish political commitment to the green agenda.
Ford makes its money selling old-fashioned, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, and it loses a big chunk of that money — more than $30,000 per EV sold, by one estimate — in what amounts to an act of environmental penance.
In a similar way, the people designing our new homes and commercial buildings are making a lot of dumb decisions — solar panels on everything! — in the service of the “net zero” ideology adopted by elite institutions in architecture and construction.
But the purpose of a house is to keep you out of the rain, not to generate 2,000 kWh of solar power a year so that you can pretend your house is carbon-neutral.
Israel-Hamas war: How we got here
2005: Israel unilaterally withdraws from the Gaza Strip more than three decades after winning the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War.
2006: Terrorist group Hamas wins a Palestinian legislative election.
2007: Hamas seizes control of Gaza in a civil war.
2008: Israel launches military offensive against Gaza after Palestinian terrorists fired rockets into the town of Sderot.
2023: Hamas launches the biggest attack on Israel in 50 years, in an early-morning ambush Oct. 7, firing thousands of rockets and sending dozens of militants into Israeli towns.
Terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israelis, wounded more than 4,200, and took at least 200 hostage.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to announce, “We are at war,” and vowed Hamas would pay “a price it has never known.”
The Gaza Health Ministry — which is controlled by Hamas — reported at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,500 injured since the war began.
The purpose of Harvard is to educate and support scholarship, not to function as the world’s most comfortable indoctrination camp.
The purpose of the New York Times is to report the news, not to amplify Hamas propaganda.
Institutions work when the people entrusted with the institution’s prestige and resources serve its mission rather than expecting the institution to serve as a platform for their own personal ambitions — whether those are social, political, economic, or, as they often are, all three.
We need a functional Harvard and a functional New York Times and a revenue-focused Ford for the same reason we need a functional Congress.
And we don’t have a properly functional Harvard or New York Times for the same reason we don’t have a properly functional Congress, i.e., little people who cannot serve—because they cannot see—something bigger than themselves.
Kevin D. Williamson is a national correspondent at The Dispatch and a writer in residence with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
