Uthmeier’s found another windmill to tilt at

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is a busy, busy bee, darting from human trafficking prosecutions to going after shoplifting gangs to trying to outlaw drag queen Christmas shows to accusing Microsoft of anti-Christian bias to cheerleading book bans.

Incensed by a recent hard foul the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Cunningham landed on the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham, he’s even threatening charges of assault and battery.

Never mind Carrington was ejected from the game (the appropriate penalty); never mind the WNBA doesn’t play in Florida.

If athletic violence is a concern, perhaps we can look forward to the AG policing vicious hits in college football?

Here’s an idea: Uthmeier gets himself a whistle, enlists a couple of cops, and pre-prints a stack of charge sheets.

All he has to do is stand on the sidelines of the FSU-Miami game for a quarter, and he could score a bunch of arrests.

It could be since closure of his pet detention camp, Alligator Alcatraz, Uthmeier feels he doesn’t have enough to do, even though there are still pending lawsuits over the environmental damage done to the Everglades to deal with.

His current obsession is The New York Times. The AG has sent the paper’s parent company a 28-page letter outlining what he sees as its manifold transgressions and demanding six years-worth of board documents, information on editorial decisions, and internal communication records.

He’s ordered the Times Co. to respond by Aug. 25.

The ostensible reason? The State Board of Administration, which manages Florida’s pension funds, holds 147,831 shares of Times Co. stock.

Bias?

What Uthmeier sees as the paper’s “editorial malpractice” could, he claims, cause the Times’ value to tank and blameless Floridians to suffer financial losses.

He says, “The Times tells investors that its brand and reputation are its most important asset,” but “if people see its journalism as unreliable or biased, the company can be hurt.”

His beef is over the Times’ coverage, some in its news sections, more in its editorial pages, of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.

Uthmeier’s particularly upset about two-time Pulitzer winner Nicholas Kristof’s May 2026 column on Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians.

Palestinian prisoners say they were raped and abused by Israeli soldiers, West Bank settlers, and members of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security force.

Kristof’s piece was carefully reported, based on evidence gathered from human rights organizations, interviews with Palestinian detainees, Israeli lawyers, other journalists, and eyewitnesses.

In other words, it was vetted and fact-checked to a fare-thee-well, and Times editors stand by it.

It should be noted the newspaper has also published numerous stories (I counted at least 10) on how Hamas raped, mutilated, and murdered Israeli women during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

In his letter, Uthmeier blasts the Times for what he sees as bias — an article of faith on the right — and cites the case of Graham Platner, Maine’s one-time Democratic U.S. Senate candidate.

Platner’s campaign imploded after multiple women accused him of sexual assault, including rape. The Times, according to Uthmeier, would not “report self-evidently newsworthy information” about Platner, and was clearly “downplaying or outright ignoring information, such as his Nazi tattoo.”

Try research

Now, I’m pretty sure somebody in the AG’s office knows how to deploy that useful tool we call “Google,” and might, with the tiniest expenditure of energy, have discovered the Times was, in fact, among the first news outlets to report on the “Nazi tattoo” in October 2025.

Now, come on, Mister Attorney General. You’re a Georgetown Law J.D. You know better than to make stupid assertions that don’t stand up to minimal scrutiny.

But that’s not all: Uthmeier trots out what he thinks is damning evidence of malfeasance: “between October 7th 2023 and June 2024, the Times admitted 72 errors in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war that had to be corrected.”

He insists the majority of those errors were somehow “favorable” to Hamas.

Perhaps the AG needs to learn how responsible journalists work. If you make a mistake, you own it, fix it, and run the correction in a prominent place.

Which is what the Times does — mostly. No newspaper gets it right 100% of the time.

The Times has indeed struggled with some notable scandals and screw-ups: Judith Miller, the reporter who swallowed the Bush administration’s nonsense about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, helped push the nation into a stupid, destructive and wholly unnecessary war.

Then there was Jayson Blair, the serial plagiarist who faked his reporting and was forced out in 2003.

The Times wrote a 7,000-word story detailing Blair’s — and its own — sins against journalism.

On Oct. 23, 2023, the Times, along with the AP, Reuters, Politico and others, initially blamed Israel for a rocket blast that killed hundreds at a Gaza hospital.

Honest errors

You can see why they might have thought that: The IDF has never hesitated to kill Palestinian civilians, including aid workers, reporters, and a 5-year old girl called Hind Rajab.

But the story was wrong. It wasn’t the Israelis. The various news outlets, including the Times, admitted their mistake.

Finding the facts in violent, chaotic conditions — terrorist attacks, wars, humanitarian crises — is difficult. Reporters get it wrong sometimes and then, when better information comes along, strive to get it right.

Contrast this with Uthmeier’s selective outrage over Kristof’s column, huffing puffing and gotcha-ing in his letter, pouncing on Times Executive Editor Joe Kahn’s statement that the paper would not have run “that exact piece” in its news pages

Of course it wouldn’t. It’s an opinion piece, not a news story.

Uthmeier again demonstrates his ignorance of journalism, declaring the Kristof column wasn’t actually opinion because it “did not express a view. It asserted events.”

He says Kristof “asserted that Israeli prison guards committed sexual violence against Palestinian detainees,” claims Uthmeier insists must be either true or false.

He adds, “They are not opinions in any sense the law recognizes, and the [Times] Company did not defend them as opinions. Its spokesperson defended them as reporting.”

Note to the AG: In a newspaper, “opinion” isn’t confined to somebody ranting about how “The Odyssey” movie didn’t do justice to the poem or speculating that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez freezing her eggs means she’s running for president in 2028. Many pieces published on the Opinion Page rely on in-depth, often difficult, often controversial reporting to tell a story in a personal, engaged, morally urgent voice that conveys the writer’s feelings.

You don’t do that in a news story.

Define ‘opinion’

What Uthmeier’s doing is constructing a legal framework based on a definition of “opinion” he thinks can inflict damage on the newspaper he sees as MAGA’s chief antagonist.

So, what’s this really about?

Uthmeier insists he simply wants to protect shareholder value on behalf of Florida’s retirees.

OK, I’ll bite. Is the New York Times Co. financially shaky, then?

Doesn’t look like it: The paper’s been adding subscribers and shows an 11% increase in revenues this year.

That’s a pretty good return.

Florida’s portfolio isn’t wall-to-wall winners, anyway. The state also invests in Meta, which has lately lost 10% of its stock price, and Oracle, which has seen its stock downgraded to one rung above junk.

In his letter, the AG raises the defamation suit Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox “News,” which claimed Dominion was part of a vast conspiracy to steal the 2020 election and was somehow controlled by Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013) and aided by George Soros.

Fox’s factchecking “Brain Room” told the network it was all nonsense. Fox talking heads didn’t care: They kept throwing gasoline on the flames.

Dominion sued the notoriously truth-challenged Fox and settled for $800 million.

I expect you can see there’s a big difference between what Fox did and what he alleges the Times did.

(To be fair, Uthmeier could have pointed to how the Times reported an Alabama basketball player was present at a murder. He wasn’t.

The paper corrected its error, but lost a recent defamation suit.)

The AG’s letter also notes the Israeli government has vowed to sue the Times over the Kristof story. If the Times loses, it might have to shell out millions.

Ulterior motive?

To date, however, no suit has been filed.

And it won’t be. The discovery in such a case (prison records, medical records, witness statements) would be ugly.

Again, what is this really about?

Could it simply be another ultra-conservative attack on freedom of the press? Even if Uthmeier’s high-handed letter produces exactly nothing, he might hope it has a chilling effect on a newspaper he views as antithetical to his values.

Or is it a publicity grab by an ambitious guy running for a high-profile gig as attorney general of the third largest state in the nation?

Uthmeier knows he’s likely to win his race. I suspect he’s looking beyond AG to, maybe, governor? U.S. senator? An even higher office?

The current occupant of the White House will not, despite the fervent hopes of his disciples, live forever.

Somebody has to wrap himself in the MAGA flag and raise the sword of Trumpism in the battle against the 21st century.

Why not James Uthmeier, Esq.?