The New York Times is reportedly "cutting ties" with Anat Schwartz [twitter.com], who co-authored an October front-page item detailing alleged mass rapes by Hamas terrorists during its attack on Israel. It turns out that Schwartz was an IDF intelligence officer, has no prior journalism experience, liked a social media post calling for Palestinians to be slaughtered [imgur.com], and that The Daily, The New York Times' key podcast, found the story too poorly-sourced to use in an episode.
The New York Times is investigating Israeli freelancer Anat Schwartz after she repeatedly liked multiple X posts that indicated a pro-Israel bias, including one that called for the Gaza Strip to be turned into a "slaughterhouse."
"We are aware that a freelance journalist in Israel who has worked with The Times has 'liked' several social media posts," Times spokesperson Danielle Rhodes Ha said in a statement. "Those 'likes' are unacceptable violations of our company policy. We are currently reviewing the matter."
Schwartz began reporting for the Timesin November, where her stories focused on Israel's response to the Oct. 7 attacks. Her most prominent piece was a co-bylined article detailing sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas during the raids. The story had drawn internal criticism from staffers and led the Times to pull an episode of The Daily podcast on the original story, according to The Intercept.
Schwartz has already gotten everything she wanted out of her "ties" with the Times, so her being scapegoated by it is meaningless. A more productive outcome would be scrutiny of the editors who commissioned the item and allowed it to run, without fact-checking, apparently over the objections of others at the newspaper.
Bhaskar Sunkara puts it in the form of a simple question" "why did Anat Schwartz get prominent bylines covering a highly contested topic with no prior journalistic experience?"
Remember Judith Miller? "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce" is the cliché, but we're more than two iterations into this fractal.
Previously: NY Times suffers from dementia, forgetting its own role in the Iraq War debacle
