New York Times appends two Israel-related editing notes in two days

The New York Times has issued two Israel-related notes on consecutive days, correcting a caption that overstated the size of US-supplied bombs used in Gaza by a factor of 20 and removing a line that critics said cast Israelis' status as victims of the 7 October attacks as a matter of opinion.

The bomb caption

The first correction, dated 15 September, concerns a picture caption accompanying an article on US arms supplies to Israel. The caption misidentified the size of the bombs that have caused widespread civilian harm in Gaza. The note states that they are 2,000 pounds, not 40,000 pounds, and attributes the mistake to an editing error.

The perception line

The second, an editors' note dated 16 September, relates to a 14 September article about the backlash to a documentary. The article contained the line "But Israelis still largely view themselves as the victims of Oct. 7." The note says that, because of an editing error, the article included a statement intended to convey Israelis' view of their government's military response, but that the wording inadvertently suggested that Israelis' experience as terror victims was a matter of perception. The line has been removed.

The reaction

The line was spotted by Tamar Sternthal of CAMERA, the media monitoring group, and circulated widely after the Israel-based commentator Eitan Fischberger posted it on X. It was criticised by figures including the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt, the CNN commentator Scott Jennings and Israel's diaspora affairs minister, Amichai Chikli. The Washington Free Beacon, whose account of both errors is written by a CAMERA board member, noted that the notes came weeks after lawyers complaining about a Nicholas Kristof column sought access to Times board records. A Times spokesman did not respond to its questions about which editors were responsible.

Why it matters

The two errors are different in kind. The caption is a straightforward factual mistake, though not a trivial one: the stated figure is roughly double the weight of the largest conventional bomb the US has ever used, and it would have given readers a grossly inflated impression of the munitions involved. The second error is subtler and, for many readers, more troubling. The sentence was arguably defensible as a description of how Israelis see the war, yet its construction relegated an established fact, that Israelis were the victims of the 7 October massacre, to the status of a belief.

Language of that kind is how framing works. It rarely involves an outright falsehood; it involves the quiet reassignment of facts to the category of claims. The Times acknowledged as much in its own note, which is to its credit. But both errors were attributed to editing, which raises the obvious question of how two Israel-related lapses passed through the same paper's desks in the same 48 hours.