NY Times Masks Antisemitism Concerns at Wikipedia as Conservative Culture War

By: Jennifer Kouzi July 7, 2026

The New York Times is engaging in partisan gaslighting.

Tiffany Hsu’s “Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet,” (July 5, 2026) allows readers to ignore claims of antisemitism, anti-Israel sentiment and pro-Hamas narratives in Wikipedia based on who the author says are making them. Hsu’s suggestion that MAGA-branded politicians and public figures are weaponizing antisemitism to fight Wikipedia ignores Democratic politicians, nonpartisan NGOs, and investigative journalists who agree with the claims.

According to The Times, “[t]he MAGA right . . . is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism [at Wikipedia].” In describing the “chorus of conservatives” tackling the issue, the author linked to a Republican-led congressional oversight committee investigation and Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s October 2025 letter to Wikipedia, which included his belief that editors were coordinating to spread antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives.

To describe the antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives Cruz alleged, Hsu hyperlinked to a January 2025 article about The Heritage Foundation’s plan to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors it believed were publishing antisemitic content. (The Heritage Foundation is best known for authoring Project 2025, a conservative platform that one poll found 85 percent of Democrats opposed.)

While Hsu included Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger’s name in the “chorus,” there was neither a description of his complaints nor an associated hyperlink, as there was for Cruz, Tucker Carlson, David Sacks and Sanger’s co-founder Jimmy Wales. What made the omission most flagrant was that Sanger had been recently permanently banned from editing on Wikipedia, something The Times reported and which Sanger wrote about for the Free Press. Among other biases he described, he noted rising anti-Zionism on the left meant pro-Israel views were disfavored on Wikipedia. He also said around 400 active administrators, mostly anonymous, effectively control the site.

The omission is also startling given new Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan’s  recommendation to those convinced of its bias. Meehan, who says Wikipedia is seen as trustworthy, “beloved” and “credible,” tells people to “become an editor.” Meehan is then quoted as saying, “More dialogue, frankly, is what’s needed in this moment. So the door is open.” (Apparently except for Sanger.)

In dismissing accusations against Wikipedia – not just for anti-Jewish bias – Hsu wrote, “There is no shadowy mastermind, no leftist cabal, according to the foundation,” employing terms from an antisemitic conspiracy theory dictionary. Instead, Hsu explained, 250,000 unpaid strangers with pseudonyms like “WooHooKitty” serve as editors for the entries on a site averaging 508 million views per day. 

Non-Republicans Also Have Grave Concerns about Wikipedia

In September 2024, Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres called out Wikipedia’s bias.

On May 1, 2025, five months before Senator Cruz’s letter, Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz co-led a bipartisan group of 23 House members in writing to the Wikimedia CEO about editor bias and preventing antisemitism and pro-terrorist content from infiltrating Wikipedia.

CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Jonathan Greenblatt, a former special assistant to Barack Obama, also sounded the alarm about a coordinated effort to spread antisemitic and anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, Wikipedia declared the anti-hate organization could not be trusted on topics of Israel and antisemitism.

The American Jewish Committee (AJC), a Jewish advocacy organization, headed by former Democratic Representative Ted Deutsch, has also criticized Wikipedia.

What is Actually Happening at Wikipedia?

In an article over 1,800 words long, The Times did not spare one sentence to elucidate the Jewish and/or Israel-related concerns about Wikipedia. Instead, The Times made a non-partisan issue partisan in order to discredit, or avoid evaluation of, the complaints.

For years, Jewish News Syndicate journalist Aaron Bandler, investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg and others have documented the campaign within Wikipedia “to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.” (Rindsberg also documents other influence operations on Wikipedia, including against India and Hindus and the flood of pro-Iranian regime propaganda.)

In 2024, Rindsberg explained how a group of about 40 pro-Palestine editors coordinate efforts on Wikipedia without being noticed. One editor, Rindsberg revealed, removed Israel as the Jews’ place of origin, and in article about Hamas, removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter calling for the destruction of Israel and killing of Jews, among many other troubling edits. In less than a two-year span, that editor contributed over 12,000 edits to Palestine-Israel articles; another made more than 15,000 edits in the same period. The top 20 editors of the group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority on Palestine-Israel or historical articles connected to the topic. Wikipedia has abandoned its principle of neutrality, with entries such as “Gaza genocide” relying disproportionately on groups critical of Israel, with no balance given.

As Rindsberg explained in a December 2025 podcast appearance, the “Gang of 40” manipulates anything and everything having to do with Israel, “Palestine,” anything Jewish and Zionism. 

Wikipedia has taken some action to ban a few editors from editing Israel-related topics. But as Rindsberg explained in the podcast, when six of the Gang of 40 were banned from editing in that space for one year (after which time they can appeal) they moved quickly to manipulate more articles before their ban began – and then froze those sections of the article until their bans could be repealed.

The Times engaged in dangerous partisan gaslighting by framing as a right-wing culture war a heavily documented, coordinated campaign of digital revisionism against Jews, their land and history. Pretending the urgent alarms sounded by Democrats, mainstream Jewish civil rights organizations and independent journalists don’t exist serves a narrative and seemingly an agenda. Hsu led her readers to believe that complaints of antisemitism are merely a weapon being used by a political brand they are conditioned to reject. In doing so, The Times condones anti-Jewish propaganda being served to hundreds of millions, if not billions, around the world.

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