The Enormous Blast Radius of the NYT’s Dog-Rape Debacle

By Seth Mandel

Monday, May 25, 2026

 

There’s much debate over the implications of Nicholas Kristof’s decision to publish his Israeli-rape-dogs phantasmagoria, but it’s important to widen the lens and examine how this latest disgrace is part of a broad institutional failure inside and outside the media environment that produced it.

 

It has become common to point out the Times’ hypocrisy here by noting that when its opinion section published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton calling for the tougher policing of riots, the Times unraveled: Opinion Editor James Bennet was pushed out, as were Bari Weiss and Adam Rubenstein.

 

But this purge was more than just a demonstration of elite fragility. It ensured that an ideological monolith would serve as the gatekeepers of future articles. The years that followed October 7 demonstrated how this would apply to anything Israel-related: accusations were published first and investigated later, if at all. Kristof’s article was an escalation in the war on truth, not an innovation.

 

The Times retains a ton of influence over other publications in the same ideological sphere, which includes much of American and British corporate-left media. So the institutional rot isn’t limited to the Times; it seeps into media practices on a much wider scale.

 

Kristof’s article represents the entry of this particular libel into mainstream discourse after months of confinement to the fringes. Now it won’t require anyone else to “report” it to keep it in the news ecosystem. One needs only to reference the New York Times or the scandal Kristof’s claims have kicked off, and voila: Lots of people in establishment media spaces are suddenly talking about imaginary Israeli monster dogs.

 

Moving beyond media, we come to the world of NGOs. In 2014, Matti Friedman explained why these foreign-funded organizations have become important to Mideast-based journalists: They “provide reporters with social circles, romantic partners, and alternative employment—a fact that is more important to reporters now than it has ever been, given the disintegration of many newspapers and the shoestring nature of their Internet successors.… For many foreign journalists, these [NGOs] were not [reporting] targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters.”

 

Kristof relies on such NGOs as well. One of them is the Committee to Protect Journalists. That organization has, as we have detailed here at Commentary, kept a running list of supposed “journalists” killed by Israel during the war, many of whom are later revealed to have been terrorist operatives for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad all along. Those revelations come from the “martyrdom” notices of the terror groups themselves, as the researcher Salo Aizenberg has persistently pointed out. When that happens, CPJ tends to delete the terrorist’s name from its list of “journalists.”

 

The Washington Free Beacon argues, persuasively, that this process deeply undercuts CPJ’s credibility as a source and as a gatekeeper of sources for folks like Kristof. I agree. As I wrote two weeks ago: “The problem is that it’s easy for an organization like CPJ to quietly delete someone’s page from a false list well after the fighting stops and the hoax has outlived its usefulness. So that’s what they do.”

 

Others have focused on the fact that Kristof also relied on information from Euro-Med, an organization with ties to terrorist figures and which has perpetuated all sorts of weird science-fiction anti-Israel hoaxes. Because of that history, I tend not to think of Euro-Med as an NGO at all, though technically it is. Euro-Med is despised even by many Palestinians who see it as nothing but a shield for Hamas and therefore an enemy of human rights. But perhaps the point of the story is that more established NGOs have become just as corrupted as organizations like Euro-Med, and that they do belong in the same category after all.

 

In fact, CPJ’s impact could plausibly be considered more deleterious to democracy and human rights than Euro-Med’s precisely because it carries a sheen of legitimacy that Euro-Med never has and never will.

 

I would go a step further and suggest that the behavior of groups like CPJ incentivize the establishment of other groups that exist solely to feed journalists bad information. CPJ’s fall from grace is a major story all its own. That it enables the creation of bad actors that never had any grace to lose is just part of that story. The same is true of the Times.

 

This is not merely a story of one journalist behaving unconscionably. It’s a story of Western institutional collapse and the dreary remnants that rise from the rubble to perpetuate all the evil things its predecessors got away with.