New York Times Increasingly Relies on Left-Wing Nonprofit Journalism

The New York Times, which boasts about its independence and employing more than 2,000 journalists, is increasingly relying on left-leaning outside nonprofit organizations to provide news and editorial content.

The latest example is a piece from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Among its sob stories of "hardship": a person with "a household salary of $315,000" who has "given up on an elite college education for my kids."

"Putting the troubled genie of economic insecurity back in the bottle is difficult. Optimism, or at the very least stability, is lost over time, over the many decisions that people have to make. These stymied small ambitions add up. Americans no longer feel as if the stories of their lives makes sense anymore," the Times article asserts.

Sunday’s New York Times Magazine cover story, which stoked fears about farmed salmon causing pollution, was attributed to "the Outlaw Ocean Project." That’s a nonprofit organization that says its major donors include "the Bloomberg Ocean Fund and Oceans5, the Oak Foundation, the Packard Foundation, 11th Hour Racing Charitable, LLC/The Schmidt Family Foundation, Humanity United, the Philip Stephenson Foundation, the Moore Foundation, the McPike-Zima Foundation, the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, the Drue and HJ Heinz II Charitable Trust, the Paul M. Angell Foundation, and the Becht Foundation..." Michael Bloomberg is a former Democratic presidential candidate and major Democratic political donor, and Oceans5 is fiscally sponsored by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which a watchdog report recently identified as part of a far-left network of Rockefeller charities.

Wednesday, the Times followed up with an opinion section multimedia feature from Alissa Quart, "editorial director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project."

The Economic Hardship Reporting Project is a nonprofit organization with backing from left-wing donors including George and Alexander Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, and the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation’s former chief executive, Darren Walker, was pictured at the New York Times 175th birthday party and regularly gets quoted in New York Times articles even when he has nothing to do with them, such as in a recent piece about a new director of the New York Philharmonic. (Read about Walker’s $4.2 million Los Angeles house in the pages of the Wall Street Journal here.)

Ford, now led by former Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken, this month announced seven new funding areas, among them "information." It complained that "reputable media sources are drowned out" and said, "We see a window of opportunity to fight for a healthy information and media environment that buttresses rather than undermines democracy. The moment has come to treat information as a public good."

Quart has been complaining about what she calls "the myth of American upward mobility" dating back to at least the Biden-Harris administration, but the New York Times "interactive" piece takes it to a newly, if unintentionally, comedic low.

Among the Times tear-jerker stories, conveniently timed to push a negative economic narrative just before the midterm elections, is "Dana Reynolds, 38," who "has a household income between $200,000 and $250,000 and has one child in Reno, Nev." She has given up on "Moving out of a starter home."

Then there is Zoe Temco, 32, who "makes $130,000 in Cambridge, Mass." Zoe says, "I picked a STEM major and then I went to grad school at M.I.T., and then I got a very good job. I was told if I did all of those things, then I could have a house. Life would fall into place. And I did all of those things in the order I was supposed to, yet I’m sitting here in my apartment. Like, it didn’t work out."

The $315,000 "household salary"—tops in the Times package—is from Jill Gurvey of Philadelphia. The Washington Free Beacon found that her partner, Matt Wray, is a professor of sociology and chair of the Sociology Department at Temple University. He got a Ph.D. in ethnic studies in 2000 from the University of California, Berkeley. Federal campaign finance records indicate he donated $604 to the 2020 presidential campaign of socialist Bernie Sanders. A federal campaign finance record from November 2025 listed Gurvey’s occupation and employer as "not employed." In 2024, Gurvey published an opinion piece in the Chicago Tribune that also appeared in other outlets, lashing out at Israel.

"I am ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until quite recently, in the weeks after Oct. 7, that I began to understand that there was something deeply wrong with my understanding of how and why Israel became a state. I liken it to a crisis of faith. It took Hamas’ horrifying attack for me to open my mind to the possibility that there was another narrative to Israel’s founding," Gurvey writes. "During this questioning period, my son recommended I read the work of Rashid Khalidi. … Jews — themselves persecuted through the ages simply for being Jewish — displaced an entire people, simply for not being Jewish. Hamas’ violent uprising of Oct. 7 and the wider Palestinian resistance need to be understood from that starting point."

She wrote, "How can my fellow Jews go on about how Israel has a right to defend itself, as if one atrocity plus another atrocity isn’t doubly morally reprehensible? My own life suggests a possible answer: the intentional and systematic miseducation of Jews in America."

Where and how does the New York Times find these people?

The project includes named credits to a staggering nine other individuals: Julie Ho, Tenzin D. Tsagong, Tim Davis, Anh Nguyen, Meher Ahmad, Ana Becker, Rebecca Chew, Jessie Wender, Adam Ferriss. It is an example of the Editors’ Rule of Byline Inflation, which states that the reliability of a piece of journalism is inversely proportional to the number of journalists named as contributors to it.

The New York Times is published by a for-profit company controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, who are rich well beyond the $50-a-month recurring donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign level. The New York Times Company in 2022 hired a full time "director of philanthropic partnerships," Marcia Parker, to "lead a team created in 2019 to develop newsroom initiatives funded by foundations and in partnership with nonprofits." The Times is busy telling Wall Street what a great business it has, while simultaneously holding out a tin cup soliciting for charitable help. If Soros and Omidyar and Bloomberg or Heather Gerken want to subsidize the Ochs-Sulzberger family with charitable dollars, God bless them. But the tradeoff for Times readers and non-Sulzberger shareholders involves seeing whatever value there is in the news and opinion reporting diluted by someone else’s storytelling.

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