Florida Funds File Suit Versus The NYTimes

Shareholders of The New York Times Company sued the newspaper’s parent company Wednesday in New York County Supreme Court, asking a judge to force the board to turn over internal records the company has refused to produce for four months. 

The petitioners — Florida’s State Board of Administration, acting for the Florida Retirement System Trust Fund, and the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research — say they need the files to determine whether directors failed to oversee the paper’s editorial standards. Most of the requested records concern coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. 

A Times spokesperson had no immediate comment. 

The 48-page petition is a books-and-records action, not a defamation case. The shareholders argue that repeated publication of what they call false or unsupported claims, plus delayed corrections, raises questions about board oversight and shareholder value. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a trustee and counsel for the SBA, said the suit is about corporate governance and protecting pension investments, not second-guessing individual articles. The Florida fund holds roughly 148,000 to 160,000 Times shares and serves more than 1.2 million members and beneficiaries. 

The filing leans on testimony from an anonymous former Times employee, a Jewish woman who spent nearly a decade on the video desk before leaving in March 2026. According to the petition, she raised concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at least 15 times between 2019 and her departure, using managers, the standards desk, EthicsPoint, employee relations, and human resources. In an interview with The Free Press, which first reported the suit, she said the public “deserves a better picture of how the Times manufactures the news when Jews or Israel are involved.” She asked to remain unnamed over concern for her family’s safety. 

The petition says those internal channels turned on her rather than the conduct she reported. It quotes a human-resources response as: “If you don’t like our values here, maybe you should go find a place whose values align with yours.”