On May 11, 2026, Nicholas Kristof published an opinion column in The New York Times presenting grave allegations, based on accounts cited in the article, of rape and sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees by Israeli personnel and others.
Israel's response was immediate. The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister called the piece "a blood libel" and announced legal action. The Times stood behind Kristof, insisting that the column was deeply reported opinion journalism.
Israel is right to reject the column as false and defamatory. But rejection alone is not enough. On the surface, this appears to be another dispute over facts: Israel denounces the column as false, while The Times insists that it was rigorously edited and stands by its reporting. The moment Israel enters that arena on those terms alone, however, it accepts the role assigned to it in advance. In the eyes of many readers, The Times becomes the institution before which Israel is expected to defend itself. The reader is presented with a prepackaged frame: an American newspaper has published allegations; Israel denies them.
This is the realm of hasbara, or public advocacy. A state must rebut falsehoods. But hasbara operates at the level of information: is a claim true or false? Cognitive warfare asks a deeper question: through what frame does the reader encounter the information in the first place?
This is where US President Donald Trump offers a useful case study. For years, he did not merely dispute individual articles. He challenged the credibility and authority of the source itself, repeatedly branding major media outlets, including the New York Times, as “fake news.” In December 2025, he went further, writing on Truth Social that "The Failing New York Times... is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation." When a news item enters through the Times, it carries institutional weight built over generations. Trump attacked exactly this standing.
This is the difference between fact correction and authority framing. Fact-correction says: this item is false. Authority-framing says: the authority conveying the facts is unreliable and flawed, pause before accepting it through the authority attached to it. Ask not only what was published, but who defines what counts as serious, credible, and authoritative.
America's enemies exploit the NYT for their own gain
That authority is precisely what America's rivals understand and exploit. The pattern is visible across rival capitals, but the issue is not citation. The issue is conversion. Rival governments and hostile media do not merely quote the Times; they convert its institutional authority and standing into an American credential for claims against the United States and its allies. They use the Times to recast adversarial propaganda as an American source cited against America. The cognitive move lies in the transformation: a report becomes both an accusation and evidence, a headline is made to read like an admission, and an opinion column is made to function as institutional permission to doubt the country from which it came.
The first mode is the use of the Times as an American witness against American authority. In a 2022 policy paper portraying, in Beijing's telling, American democracy as chaotic and unfit to serve as a global model, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs quoted an American expert writing in the New York Times that Trump and his supporters "would be willing to depart from established constitutional rules and norms with his Big Lie," and that "the people will be thrust into political and financial chaos." Two years later, in a paper attacking the US National Endowment for Democracy, the ministry cited the Times' own headline, "Mixed US Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos," as evidence that the US government had "subverted, through NED, Haiti's democratically elected government."
China’s Global Times later used the same logic: it opened a commentary on US-China relations with a NYT column titled "I Just Returned From China. We Are Not Winning," then argued that pressure and tariffs cannot contain China and that America must first "get our house in order." In each case, Beijing converts a Times reference into an American witness against American authority.
The second mode is the use of the Times to support a state narrative against Washington. In April 2025, TASS, Russia's state news agency, cited the Times to assert that the US had been "much deeper involved in the conflict in Ukraine than Washington had admitted," that the US provided daily coordinates of Russian positions "from its base in Wiesbaden," that it "checked and controlled all strikes carried out with HIMARS," and that the CIA had been "in active coordination with the Kiev regime with regard to attacks on Crimea." Here, TASS converts the Times report into support for a Russian state narrative: that Ukraine fights with deeper American direction than Washington publicly acknowledged. TASS needs the reader to notice that the claim is carried by an American source.
The third mode is convergent use within the Iran-Hezbollah media ecosystem. During the 2026 Israel-Iran conflict, two outlets aligned with the axis drew on the Times against Trump. Al-Manar, designated by the US Treasury as owned or controlled by the Iran-funded Hezbollah terrorist network, ran the story under the headline "NYT Leak Undercuts Trump's Iran Claims," presenting the report as undermining what Trump and then-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as the destruction of the Iranian military.
Press TV, Iran's state broadcaster, ran a separate Times report under the headline "NY Times: Trump miscalculated Iran's retaliation as war costs soar," citing the Times that "the episode is emblematic of how much Mr. Trump and his advisers misjudged how Iran would respond." In Al-Manar's framing, a Times report becomes an "NYT Leak" that undercuts Trump; in Press TV's framing, a Times analysis becomes evidence that Trump miscalculated Iran. They use the Times' authority and stature to make an argument against Trump sound less like Tehran or Hezbollah, and more like an American source cited against America.
This is the arena Trump opened. Not whether a given article is accurate, but why a particular institution still enters public consciousness as a stamp of authority and credibility.
The Kristof column reaches Western readers through the same respected institutional channels of the New York Times. Israel continues to battle its effects. Yet the proper response is not merely to refute it. It is to expose what it becomes once released into the world.
Every time the Times publishes an accusation of this nature, Israel and its allies should systematically map its “afterlife”: who reproduces and re-uses it, which outlets amplify it with inflammatory headlines, which hostile media strip it of context, and which regimes weaponize it as proof against both Israel and America.
The Times’ credibility is not harmed merely by angry slogans or denunciations. It is eroded by calmly and relentlessly showing the public exactly how its authority is transformed and corrupted in hostile hands.