Published July 8, 2026
The Committee to Protect Journalists recently voted not to exclude from its list of journalists those who are either in militant groups or backed by state-sponsored media. The question of trust and reliability when it comes to news and information from conflicts involving terrorists continues.
Just a few weeks back, Nicholas Kristof wrote a dubiously reported opinion piece about the treatment of Palestinians in Israeli detention that stitched together unreliable sources into a blood libel against the Jewish people. It was unsurprising to me. As an Iraqi immigrant, these claims were similar to the denigration of Jews I heard all the time growing up in the Middle Eastern subculture. Yet a second problem of his own making has emerged that further casts Kristof’s reliability and honesty into question.
When Kristof left the New York Times in 2021 after 37 years, 20 of them as a columnist, to run for governor of Oregon, he created an ethical challenge for the paper. Many donors to Kristof’s campaign were people he had covered or worked alongside, or who moved within the same professional circles. When his campaign ended and he returned to his column, the New York Times publicly addressed the issue. Upon his return, the paper told Rolling Stone that he would avoid writing about those donors or disclose the relationship. He did neither. The New York Times appears never to have held Kristof accountable for violating its vow of transparency.
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Luma Simms is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mrs. Simms is writer and thinker on American culture, religion, politics, political theology, immigration and immigration-adjacent issues. Her primary focus has been the critique of modern America through an immigrant lens.
