Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sought to inspect records from The New York Times on Aug. 10, claiming the newspaper's pattern of admitted mistakes covering the Israel-Hamas war threatens the state's pension fund.
Uthmeier, representing the pension fund and the thousands of shares it holds in company, sent a 28-page letter to The New York Times seeking to scrutinize six years' worth of internal records, board documents, and meeting minutes, dating back to January 2020, and asking the company to prove it was operating smoothly.
"The Times tells investors that its brand and reputation are its most important assets and that if people see its journalism as unreliable or biased, the company can be hurt," Uthmeier said in a video on X. "We want to exercise our rights under New York law to review the company's internal board documents, meeting minutes, reports, and other materials, to see what the directors know.
"The First Amendment protects what a newspaper publishes, but it does not let a public company's board ignore its shareholders," Uthmeier continued.
Uthmeier is a trustee and legal counsel for Florida's State Board of Administration, which oversees the pension fund and its 160,000 shares of stock in The New York Times.
The paper has two weeks to respond or Uthmeier said he would sue them in the New York Supreme Court.
"Shareholders have tools to ensure the Board prevents The Times from becoming a newspaper the public comes to regard as untrustworthy," Uthmeier wrote in the letter.
A downturn in revenue forced the news company to consolidate its editorial staff in 2017 to shift the balance of the newsroom to give them more on-the-ground reporters.
The changes included eliminating an independent editor position, or ombudsman, which received reader complaints and questioned New York Times journalists on how they made decisions.
"Since the New York Times got rid of its independent public editor, it has several times now admitted, only after outside pressure, that published articles did not meet its standards," Uthmeier said. "According to reports, between Oct. 7, 2023 and June 2024, The Times admitted 72 errors in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war that had to be corrected. Many, if not most, of those errors favored Hamas."
The New York Times received the letter Monday and views it as an intimidation tactic, according to a spokesperson.
"We are aware of the demand letter, which, while positioned as a request under corporate law, is a clear attempt to chill First Amendment-protected journalism. We will respond more fully in due course," Danielle Rhoades Ha, spokesperson for The New York Times, told The Epoch Times.
Florida's threat of legal action comes two months after President Donald Trump's allegations against the company over coverage of the Iran war. Trump threatened to sue The New York Times in June, accusing the newspaper of publishing "treasonous" coverage that downplayed the impact of the war with Iran.
The New York Times defended its coverage, saying it was presented "fairly, thoroughly and above all, accurately to readers."
The newspaper's board of directors includes Chairman and Publisher A.G. Sulzberger; GoDaddy CEO Amanpal Bhutan; former chief product officer at the online gaming platform Roblox Manuel Bronstein; Beth Brooke, former global vice chair of public policy at Ernst and Young; Rachel Glaser, former chief financial officer at Etsy; Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha and other novels; and Meredith Kopek Levien, CEO of The New York Times.
Also on the board are: Brian McAndrews, former president and CEO of Pandora Media; David Perpich, vice chair of The New York Times; John Rogers, Jr., founder of Ariel Investments; Anuradha Subramanian, chief financial officer of Beast Industries, the parent company founded by YouTube star MrBeast; Margot Golden, freelance graphic designer; and Rebecca Van Dyck, chief marketing officer at Airbnb.