The New York Times has quietly corrected a false statement about “Israeli occupation” that it used repeatedly earlier this year. The change follows a protest by Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI).
The controversy began this past summer, when multiple Times reporters began using a new, identical phrase when referring to the Judea-Samaria territories, claiming that “three million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation” there.
The same phrase appeared in no less than six news articles in eight days in August and September.
In early September, AFSI published a report exposing the truth: that 98% of those Arabs actually live under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, not Israel; and that the Times was falsely inflating the Arab population from 2.7-million—which the Times itself had previously reported—to 3 million.
In the weeks since AFSI’s report, the Times has reversed course. Between September 13 and November 5, the Times published five news articles and one video report about those territories. Not one of those reports claimed that “three million Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation.” In addition, the video report revised the Arab population downward to the original figure of 2.7-million.
AFSI national chairman Moshe Phillips said:
“It seems clear that editors at the Times last summer instructed their reporters to make a false statement about Israel—but once they were exposed, the editors quietly stopped using that falsehood. The fight against anti-Israel media bias may be long and difficult, but this episode demonstrates that persistence can force biased editors and reporters to correct their misstatements.”