The ‘Israeli rape dogs’ blood libel fits a long, troubling tradition at The New York Times

Far from an exception, this was part of a pattern at the Times of its correspondents smoothing the jagged edges of the Nazi project. In August 1936, the Times reported from the Berlin Olympics that visitors had concluded “Hitler is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, political leader in the world today” – printed the same year Jewish German athletes were thrown off the national team and the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship. The Times correspondent who wrote those words would also opine (in a news story) that the newly reinstituted German draft would mean that “Military discipline and army tradition will prevail in the land, and neither of these countenance rioting, whether racial or of another variety.” That correspondent, Frederick Birchall, won the 1934 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence, for his “dispatches on the rise of Hitler”— only two years after another Times correspondent won a Pulitzer for denying the Ukraine Famine, a campaign by Stalin to wipe out the region’s kulaks (landowning peasants) that starved five million people to death.

If this had been the end of the story, it might be excused as the moral errors of wayward reporters. But the real damage done by the Times’ Nazi-sympathizing reporting was still to come. On September 1, 1939, the morning German tanks rolled into Poland, the paper’s lead story – citing a “semi-official news agency” – reported that Polish guerrillas had stormed a German radio station at Gleiwitz.

By 1939, there was no semi-official news agency in Germany: every German outlet was a property of Joseph Goebbels’ ministry. The actual source for the Times’ “Polish attack” story was the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi party newspaper Hitler kept on his nightstand. And the Polish “attack” itself was Operation Himmler, a staged provocation in which concentration camp prisoners were murdered by Nazi officials, dressed up as German radio station operators, and laid out as "evidence” of Polish aggression. On account of the corpses used for the plot, the Nazis nicknamed the effort Operation Canned Goods.

On its own this would have meant nothing – more Nazi propaganda from a regime already notorious for this kind of distortion. But the moment the New York Times turned it into “news,” it became a triumph, giving Hitler that pretext he needed to launch his invasion of Poland, triggering the Second World War. And just in case there had been any doubt about the Times’ integrity in the matter, the Pulitzer committee stepped in to play its part, awarding the Times correspondent who wrote the story, Otto Tolischus, the 1940 Pulitzer for his “dispatches from Berlin”.

Nearly a century later, the Times still employs the exact same ambiguity – with largely the same outcomes. Open the paper and you will inevitably read what “Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency” is saying about ceasefire proposals, strikes, and prisoners. Like Völkischer Beobachter, Tasnim is no “semi-official” news outlet. It is owned and operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The US Treasury has placed it on the Specially Designated Nationals list; the European Union sanctioned it for publishing forced confessions and posting photographs of protesters with calls for readers to help identify them. It is the propaganda arm of a regime that just murdered thousands of its own citizens in the streets and that is, by every credible measurement, a state on the verge of collapse.

The Times’ Berlin bureau chief through the 1930s was Guido Enderis, of whom the broadcaster William Shirer wrote that he was noted for “minding the Nazis less than most.” A Times staffer named Warren Irvin wrote to the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, asking plainly: “Don’t you think it’s time that the New York Times did something about its Nazi correspondent in Berlin?” Sulzberger threatened him with a libel suit.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger was Jewish, and so was Warren Irvin. Guido Enderis would spend the war years comfortably at Berlin’s Adlon Hotel while every other American correspondent was interned by the SS in a freezing château at Bad Nauheim. The reason, recorded in an internal Nazi Foreign Office memorandum unearthed after the war, was Enderis’s “proved friendliness to Germany.” A Jewish publisher threatened his own Jewish reporter with legal action to protect a man the Nazi Foreign Office had logged as one of theirs.

The Sulzbergers still own and run the Times. The paper has been a family enterprise since Adolph Ochs bought it in 1896; his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger took over in 1935 and the publisher’s title has passed down through male heirs of that line ever since: from Arthur Ochs Sulzberger to his son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., to his son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the current publisher of the paper and chairman of the New York Times Company. The most influential newspaper in the United States, and the daily catechism of the American centre-left, is a hereditary patrimony.

Look, then, at the business this week. American policy on Iran is being made inside two parallel realities. In one, the regime that just shot thousands of its own protesters from rooftops, that has been militarily humiliated by Israel and the United States, that cannot stabilise its currency or feed its citizens, lurches between collapse and elite fracture. In the other – the one narrated by Times coverage and analysis – Iran has weathered the war, recovered its leverage, and stands as the steady regional player whose proposals deserve relay through its “semi-official” outlets.

New York Times reporting on the January killings – the live fire from rooftops, the children executed, the internet blackout designed to hide the body count from the world – does, technically, exist. But it pales in comparison to the steady cadence of daily Israel coverage by the Times in which the Jewish state is the only actor with significant agency; all others are passive victims. It lacks the bottomless well of gut-churning imagery, the ceaseless personal-interest stories of victims, and the extreme journalistic risk-taking exemplified by running extraordinary claims about uncorroborated barbarities committed by a liberal democracy in an opinion column.

Take another story from just last week, “Deadly Israeli Strikes Erode Ceasefire in Lebanon”, whose very headline reveals the slanted epistemic playing field. The details are just as significant: of the two photos, both show damage from strikes in Lebanon. The only quote is from a Lebanese man, saying, “So many people are getting killed for no reason.” In case there was any question about what that reason actually is, the quote begins with the man saying that the Israelis “are hitting a lot today.” Gone is nearly three years of Hezbollah bombardment that began days after October 7, which resulted in a years-long evacuation of villages and towns in Israel’s north. Absent is an account of an Islamist fundamentalist movement that has strangled its host country, once a haven for the region’s Christians, at the behest of a group of messianic zealots thousands of miles away.

This is the form propaganda takes in asymmetric warfare. The weaker actors – Goebbels’ Reich in 1939, Tehran and its Lebanese and Palestinian proxies in 2026 – cannot win on the battlefield, so they win on the page. To succeed, it requires intermediaries trusted enough to make its claims durable in the country whose policy it is trying to shape. In 1939 that intermediary was the New York Times. In 2026 it still is.

Ashley Rindsberg is an American journalist and author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History