Florida pension fund petitions court for New York Times editorial records

By The Conservative Desk (/journals/conservative-desk)

A human resources employee at The New York Times told a Jewish former video-desk worker who had raised repeated concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias that if she did not like the paper’s values, maybe she should go find a place whose values align with hers.

That exchange now sits inside a shareholder petition filed Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026, in New York County Supreme Court. Florida’s State Board of Administration, acting for the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund, and the National Center for Public Policy Research ask a judge to compel The New York Times Company to produce internal records on how its board oversees editorial standards, source verification, corrections and related reputational risk. The company has refused for four months.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the petition at a Wednesday press conference. The Florida Retirement System Trust Fund holds 161,375 shares of New York Times Class A stock. The State Board of Administration invests for more than 1.2 million public employees and retirees. Uthmeier cast the filing as corporate governance, not a suit over any single article. Businesses hold First Amendment rights, he said, and they also carry legal duties to shareholders.

In its own disclosures to investors, the Times identifies brand and reputation as central assets and warns that perceptions of unreliable or biased journalism are a material business risk. The shareholders say they put a plain question to the company: does the board oversee compliance with the paper’s published standards on facts, quotations, photographs and timely corrections? According to the petition, Times counsel stated during a Sept. 1 conference that the company would not produce documents responsive to a narrowed request.

The narrowed request seeks board-level materials—committee charters, agendas, reporting structures and records showing whether editorial compliance issues reach directors. It excludes reporters’ notes, unpublished drafts, source identities, editorial deliberations and attorney work product. The proceeding seeks no damages and names no individual directors as defendants. It rests on shareholder inspection rights under New York Business Corporation Law, state common law and civil procedure rules.

Charlie Stadtlander, executive director of media relations and communications for the Times, gave the company’s response. “This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose,” he said. “Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment. We will defend against the suit vigorously.”

The petition cites 72 errors the Times admitted in its corrections column over eight months from October 2023 through June 2024. On Sept. 15, an article described Sharif Labad, killed in a drone strike, as a Civil Defense rescue worker and made no mention that the Israel Defense Forces had identified him as a Hamas Nukhba force member who invaded Israel on October 7. That story has not been updated. The same day, a caption overstated bomb weight as 40,000 pounds rather than the actual 2,000 pounds, a twentyfold error. An editors’ note on coverage of a NAZA documentary about Gaza called the framing that Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7 an editing error; the note concerned the deaths of 1,200 people and the taking of 250 hostages.

The filing also rests on the account of an unnamed Jewish former employee who spent nearly a decade on the video desk. She raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at least 15 times from 2019 until her departure in March 2026, using managers, the standards desk and human resources. In an interview she said, “The public deserves a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved.” She asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her family’s safety. According to the complaint, when she complained about anti-Israel bias, a human resources representative answered with the line about finding a workplace whose values align with hers.

The shareholders further note the paper’s rehiring of Gaza freelancer Soliman Hijjy shortly after Oct. 7 despite social media posts praising Adolf Hitler. A manager acknowledged in a recorded conversation that Hijjy’s posts did not meet standards. The Times said at the time that it had addressed the posts and that the freelancer had maintained high journalistic standards.

The National Center’s records effort began after a May 11, 2026, opinion column by Nicholas Kristof, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” which alleged systematic sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees and cited interviews with 14 Palestinians. Steve Milloy, executive director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project, said news requires fact-checking and extraordinary news requires extraordinary fact-checking. “The Times allowed Kristof to publish extraordinary allegations without demonstrating that its own fact-checking standards were followed,” Milloy said. “When a newspaper’s credibility is one of its most valuable assets, shareholders have a right to know whether the company has meaningful systems in place to protect it.” He added that the question is not whether the Times may publish controversial journalism—of course it may—but whether the company follows the safeguards it tells readers and investors are essential, and that if those safeguards exist the Times should be able to show its shareholders that they work.

Mark Goldfeder, an attorney for the shareholders and CEO of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, put the governance point directly. “The Times tells investors that its business depends on its credibility, then refuses to show a single document proving anyone on its board protects it.” The case, he said, will turn on charters, agendas and reporting lines, not on anyone’s opinion of the coverage. “But for Jewish and pro-Israel readers, the stakes run far past a balance sheet.”

Goldfeder continued: “When the paper of record pins a hospital strike on Israel on Hamas’s word, puts a ‘born healthy’ child on the front page whose diagnosis was sitting on a wire service two days earlier, and then only corrects six days late or never, that shapes how Israel is judged and how Jews are treated.” The petition points to a July 2025 front-page photograph of a malnourished child in Gaza whose caption said he was born healthy but was recently diagnosed with severe malnutrition, while a Getty Images caption two days earlier reported preexisting conditions. The Times later revised its article to include those conditions. The petition seeks records that could establish when photo editors learned the context.

Uthmeier said a business may hold a bias or an agenda, even a pro-Hamas one, but if so it must disclose that to governance and ultimately to shareholders. The Times has published written editorial standards requiring fact checks, verified quotations, photographic integrity and prompt corrections. Investors, he said, need to know a news organization’s governance standards. The State Board of Administration’s corporate governance oversight committee will keep monitoring, and the office will act against any publicly traded business that fails its legal obligations, because the duty is to protect the pension and its investments.

Steadman Stahl, president of the South Florida Police Benevolent Association, called the Florida Retirement System a basic core need for every state employee and credited Uthmeier’s leadership with keeping faith that the fund will remain sound and fiscally responsible.

The shareholders are not asking a court to rewrite a headline or second-guess a source. They are asking whether anyone at the top of The New York Times Company checks whether the rules the company publishes are followed. For the more than 1.2 million Floridians whose retirement savings include those 161,375 shares, the next decision sits with a New York judge.