The Questions Nobody at the NYT Asked ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, May 14, 2026

The Questions Nobody at the NYT Asked

Before the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof's piece alleging that Israeli forces train dogs to assault Palestinian prisoners, the claim had been circulating in other outlets for weeks. During that period, I asked an AI whether it was scientifically possible. The answer was no — for physiological and behavioral reasons specific to how dogs work, reasons that canine experts confirmed publicly once the Times story went viral. It seems like a reasonable thing to check before publishing. Neither Kristof nor the many layers of editors above him thought to ask it.

Why not?

The easy answer is bias — that the Times is hostile enough to Israel that it accepts ludicrous claims from Israel's detractors while applying normal evidentiary standards to everything else. Bias is certainly part of the story, and it shapes reporting in ways invisible to the reporters doing the shaping. But it doesn't fully explain the failure, because bias alone would still leave a careful editor asking whether the central claim was physically possible. The more unsettling explanation is that the question genuinely never occurred to them.

And the dog question was only the most obvious one nobody asked. Any competent reporter who wanted to test these allegations — not spike them, test them — could have found a random Israeli prison guard. Not one handed over by an NGO with an agenda, but a Yosef Shmo willing to talk anonymously, who could have described how many policies these claims would violate, how many cameras are mounted throughout the facility, how rigidly procedures are followed, and how many people — the dog trainer, the handler, multiple guards on multiple shifts — would have to maintain a coordinated silence for the story to hold together. If that guard said yes, he'd seen it or believed it was happening, that would be real corroboration. If he said the claims were institutionally impossible, the story would have to reckon with that. Kristof gathered fourteen accounts from people who had every reason to make these allegations and consulted no one with institutional knowledge to test whether the allegations were structurally coherent. No editor stopped to ask whether he had tried.

This is where the standard critique of bad journalism stops: the reporter only sought confirming evidence. But the problem runs deeper than confirmation bias, which is usually framed as a question about the reliability of sources — is this person telling me the truth? The prior question, the one that confirmation bias analysis skips, is whether the claimed facts are even possible given everything else we know about how the world works. A prison is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies run on procedure, documentation, and the path of least resistance for the people inside them. Any claim requiring dozens of institutional actors to coordinate ongoing misconduct in silence, across shifts, over months, without a single incident report or leaked photograph, fails a test that has nothing to do with the credibility of any individual witness. The question is architectural, and it comes before the question of testimony.

Most people are never taught to ask it — and this is an alarmingly underexplored gap.

The science of persuasion has been industrialized for a century. Edward Bernays founded modern public relations in the 1920s by applying Freudian psychology to mass persuasion, with the core insight that people respond to images, fears, and tribal identity far more reliably than to argument. Everything since has been refinement and acceleration: the tools now backed by neuroscience, behavioral economics, and surveillance data that tracks every click. Social media algorithms can identify what you are susceptible to before you have consciously formed an opinion, and the manipulation is personalized, optimized, and delivered at a scale Bernays could not have imagined. Online news aggregators watch which stories you click and adjust what they show you accordingly. Every major platform is engineered for maximum engagement, which turns out to mean maximum emotional activation. All of it is designed to move you before you have a chance to think.

Human beings have not kept pace.

There are questions a careful reader should bring to any claim. How reliable is this source and what do they want from me? Is the claim is falsifiable or constructed to absorb any objection? What frame is doing the argumentative work the evidence cannot? What assumptions underlie the reasoning and do they correspond to reality? What are my own biases are and are they are pulling me toward a conclusion I want rather than one I have earned?

There are books on critical thinking, but it has never been

These questions form a coherent discipline that has never been named or systematically taught. Philosophy departments teach formal logic, abstractly, to students who sought them out. Journalism schools teach sourcing and verification, which operate entirely downstream of the questions above. Law school does some of this for a small fraction of the population. No institution owns the skill of evaluating claims in real time, under conditions of uncertainty and motivated pressure. It falls through every crack in the curriculum from elementary school through graduate education, and nobody notices the gap because the gap has no name.

Meanwhile the persuaders have had a century's head start, and their tools improve every year.

I am planning a series of articles that will work through those questions and more — what they are, why they matter, and how to make them habitual rather than effortful. The goal is a practical toolkit for the reader who would prefer not to be the last person in the room to ask whether dogs can actually be trained to do that.

We have never been taught how to think clearly while those who want to manipulate us have been taught, expensively and continuously, how to convince us that their narratives are reality. The first step toward closing that gap is recognizing that it exists.

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