1) The newsroom must conduct a review of anti-Palestinian bias and produce new editorial standards for Palestine coverage.

The Times must correct decades of biased, racist reportage on Palestine by reviewing and revising its style guide, methods of sourcing and citation, and its hiring practices. The paper must bar journalists who have served in the Israeli Occupation Forces from reporting on Israel’s wars and end the practice of printing information gathered through embeds with the Israeli military. 

2) The newsroom must retract the widely debunked investigation “Screams Without Words.”

In 2004 the Times’ public editor acknowledged the paper’s misreporting on alleged but actually non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, which helped drive the disastrous U.S. invasion. “Screams Without Words,” with its unevidenced claims of “weaponized sexual assault” on October 7th, was just as damaging. Its key researcher was fired for liking openly genocidal social media posts, its key witnesses have been discredited, and its subjects have come forward to deny its claims. The reporting failed to meet the Times’ own factchecking standards.

3) The Editorial Board must call for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.

Since the editorial board finally backed a ceasefire in January of 2025 — after more than a year of genocide — that position was adopted by a number of lawmakers and finally implemented this October. But Israel has proven that a ceasefire deal is insufficient to stop its destruction of Gaza. Only an arms embargo can deliver a lasting ceasefire. The U.S. must cut off the arms shipments that make Israel’s crimes possible, and the Times editorial board should use its significant influence to call for the end of American weapons transfers to Israel. 

These demands are neither impossible nor unreasonable. The paper has updated its style guide in response to public and internal pressure before. In 1987, facing public criticism, it updated its style guide to allow writers to refer to “gay” people rather than “homosexuals” and later took stock of its scant and biased coverage of the AIDS crisis. The Times has also issued retractions. In the wake of the Iraq war, the Times catalogued the many unverified claims it repeated, pushed out the author responsible for some of its most egregious coverage, and apologized for printing biased commentary as fact. “The failure was not individual,” its public editor wrote, “but institutional.” The Times has also called for legislative action to limit arms sales, both nationally and internationally—including to Gulf states, South Sudan, China, and apartheid South Africa.

Perhaps most apt is the Times’ own accounting of its “staggering, staining failure” to report accurately and urgently on the extermination of European Jews. “The failure of America's media to fasten upon Hitler’s mad atrocities stirs the conscience of succeeding generations of reporters and editors,” a former executive editor wrote on the paper’s 150th birthday. “It leaves them obviously resolved that in the face of genocide, journalism shall not have failed in vain." We demand that Times account for its failures such that it can never again manufacture consent for mass slaughter, torture, and displacement.