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New York Times Finds Ari Fuld’s Murder Not Fit to Print
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by Ira Stoll
The New York Times logo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Sometimes The New York Times puts its bias on display not only with what it chooses to include, but what it chooses to omit. So it is this week with the murder of Ari Fuld, an Israeli-American whose fatal stabbing on Sunday by a Palestinian Arab the Times has so far deemed not fit to print.
A search for “Ari Fuld” on the Times website turns up a wire-service report by Reuters and another by the Associated Press. But there’s no staff-written report by the Times. The wire service reports did not make it into Monday or Tuesday’s print version.
Perhaps editors thought the death of a single Israeli-American didn’t rise to the level of news worth printing. After all, plenty of Americans are murdered in crimes that don’t make it into the Times. Yet the circumstances of Fuld’s death — a 45-year-old father of four, he was stabbed in the back — resonated widely with both the American and Israeli public.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and America’s ambassador to Israel both publicly reacted to Fuld’s death. Even Reform Jewish leaders whose denunciations of President Trump or Israeli government action the Times usually pays a lot of attention to, condemned the murder, with Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union of Reform Judaism tweeting, “The Union for Reform Judaism mourns the cold blooded murder of Ari Fuld z”l. A brutal act of terrorism ended his young life. Our hearts go out to his many loved ones. His devotion to Israel and the Jewish people will never be forgotten.”
The Times’ competitors did cover the news. The Wall Street Journal had its own story, as did USA Today and The Washington Post.
When a single Palestinian was apparently killed by Israelis earlier this year, the Times covered it with one, two, three news articles, all of them written by Times news personnel, and all of which appeared in the print newspaper. Ignoring Fuld’s death while obsessing over the death of a Palestinian Arab sure looks like the Times’ failing to meet its stated goal “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor.” It’s another reminder that if you are relying on the print New York Times as your sole source of information about the Middle East, you aren’t getting the full story.
Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. More of his media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.
