The Scoop
When The New York Times announced that columnist Nick Kristof would return following a scuttled 2021 bid for governor of Oregon, the paper made a promise to readers.
In a response to questions about Kristof’s return from Rolling Stone in 2022, the Times said that Kristof would refrain from writing about the financial supporters of his campaign, or would disclose those connections in his journalism.
But in at least a dozen instances since then, Kristof failed to make those disclosures. And after an inquiry from Semafor, the Times is reviewing his work.
“Previous political donations made by some people Nick Kristof mentioned in his columns should have been made more clear to readers,” Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said in an email. “Editors from Times Opinion are reviewing these articles to determine further clarifications for readers.”
In a series of pieces between 2022 and 2025, Kristof wrote favorably about Bill Gates and his nonprofit. In one case, he touted Gates’ plan for fighting global hunger. In others he cited statistics from Gates’ foundation, as well as his predictions on gene editing and his recommendation of an author. Kristof made no mention of the fact that Bill and Melinda French Gates had donated a combined $100,000 to his campaign for governor.
When Kristof mentioned Council on Foreign Relations member Deborah Fikes in a 2024 column about North Korea, he did not say that she had donated $10,000 to his political campaign.
In a 2023 column about India’s economic growth, Kristof quoted McKinsey Global Managing Partner Bob Sternfels without noting that Sternfels and his wife both donated a combined $5,000 to his campaign. And when he quoted the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye in two separate columns, in 2023 and 2024, he failed to note that Nye had donated $1,000.
Other undisclosed connections are more tangential.
Kristof repeatedly highlighted organizations in the Times’ annual holiday giving guides that had supported his campaign: The founder of Focusing Philanthropy, Larry Gilson, donated $25,000 to Kristof’s gubernatorial campaign, and Kristof featured his nonprofit in the 2023, 2024, and 2025 giving guides.
Kristof similarly featured Vision to Learn in his 2025 holiday giving guide and in a 2026 column without disclosing that the organization’s director, Joan Chu Reese, contributed $2,500 to his campaign; Oregon Strong, the PAC formed to distribute Kristof’s leftover campaign funds after he was disqualified from the gubernatorial race, contributed $100,000 to Vision to Learn.
Kristof has also written about CARE, without disclosing that two of its board members, Michael Lynton and Richard Stengel, each contributed several thousand dollars to his campaign.
Kristof did not respond to Semafor’s request for comment.
Know More
The Times’ decision to review Kristof’s work comes at a moment when the longtime opinion columnist has faced intense, ideologically-tinged scrutiny.
Kristof has been the focus of criticism from the Israeli government and its supporters since the May 11 publication of The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians, a reported piece in which he interviews Palestinians who describe being brutally sexually assaulted by Israeli guards. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the country will sue the Times for defamation, though it hasn’t done so yet.
The Free Press wrote a half dozen pieces questioning its reporting, calling it a “miscarriage of journalism.” The Wall Street Journal called it “poorly sourced.” Some media reporters speculated that the piece was not up to the Times’ newsroom standards, and was flawed because it had been published in the paper’s opinion section, while the news side had “yet to advance or incorporate any of the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner’s reporting or touch on any of the allegations made in the piece.” The Times dismissed those concerns, saying that the piece was thoroughly fact-checked before publication, and was additionally checked when critics challenged the piece. Opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury said the paper found no errors in its post-publication review.
“Nick’s reporting underwent a rigorous vetting process by Opinion’s fact-checking department to ensure that every testimony and anecdote he personally reported was supported by independent sources, as is the case with all sensitive pieces,” Kingsbury said.
Max’s view
News organizations have always faced scrutiny from targets frustrated by elements of their reporting, or looking to discredit those stories altogether. But the criticism has become increasingly personal, and focused on the journalists themselves. Online life has made this comprehensive.
Activists and political figures now often comb through the biographies of journalists at major institutions looking for instances of past behavior that could signal political bias. After The New York Times published its investigation into messages from Maine Democratic senate candidate Graham Platner, some pro-Platner voices on the left singled out one of the piece’s authors, who had been the co-president of her college’s Students for Israel chapter, decades ago. (The Platner piece has nothing to do with Israel, though Platner has been one of a growing number of Democrats who have criticized US support for Israel’s war in Gaza.)
A source flagged Kristof’s failures to disclose after his May column was published, though it wasn’t immediately clear what had prompted the source’s interest in Kristof’s work now.
When he decided to run for governor in 2021, Kristof put the Times in a somewhat unique position. It was uncommon, but not unheard of, for writers to leave mainstream journalism to pursue politics. It was more unusual for someone to try and return to the paper.
But Kristof’s path is an increasingly common one, as news media continues to polarize into political and ideological camps and as modern campaigns favor candidates skilled in capturing and maintaining attention.
In conservative media, there’s virtually no distinction at this point between media personalities and politicians, and people drift between the two seamlessly. In both his terms, President Donald Trump has filled his Cabinet and administration with Fox News personalities. Other conservative media stars have also launched their own bids, like in California, where former British political aide-turned weekend Fox host Steve Hilton is the Republican nominee for governor.
The Democratic Party has been slower to pull candidates from the ranks of supportive media, and still gravitates towards those with more traditional political resumes. Some candidates with media backgrounds, like former Daily Beast editor (and, in the spirit of transparency, my old boss) John Avlon, have fallen short. But the party’s most notable political figures have become successful podcasters and Substackers and increasingly see their communications teams as mini media companies themselves. Younger candidates from the world of digital media, like left-leaning journalist Kat Abughazaleh, have gotten closer to the end zone, and within the next few years, some could make it to the national stage.
The Times is one of a shrinking number of media organizations to enforce hard boundaries for its journalists, maintaining strict rules about social media use, partisan political speech (for non-opinion journalists), gifts, gambling, and campaign donations. But as the lines continue to blur, it will be interesting to watch how the Times navigates recruiting and maintaining a staff of journalists who increasingly see their peers in media becoming unafraid to operate more explicitly in the political realm.
Room for Disagreement
In an email to Semafor, Patrick Lee Plaisance, a professor in ethics at Penn State, told Semafor that Kristof’s quotes of various campaign donors did not necessitate disclosure, noting that there was no quid pro quo for coverage, regardless of the Times’ disclosure promise. He noted that in many of the examples reported here, Kristof was quoting high-profile public figures or subject matter experts who were “simply allowed to comment on the topic that [Kristof] is addressing.”
“While quoting a donor five years after your campaign ended may be grist for the conspiracy-minded, it is hard for me to see the substantive interests that are in conflict here,” Plaisance said. “Unless there is other evidence … that would revive a conflict concern.”
The View From The View from Kristof’s Sources
In emails to Semafor, several of the individuals mentioned in Kristof’s stories expressed their admiration for him as a journalist.
CARE’s Stengel told Semafor in an email that “nobody did a better job than Nick in writing about the devastating consequences of the cuts to USAID, which was CARE’s largest funder.”
Gilson, Focusing Philanthropy’s chair, pointed out to Semafor that the organization’s relationship with Kristof stretched back to 2014, well before his run for office.
“FP continues to relate to him on that annual column in ways unchanged from multiple years before his candidacy,” Gilson told Semafor. “My personal donation to his campaign reflects my great admiration for him.”
Notable
- The Washington Free Beacon, a right-leaning digital outlet, went beyond criticism of Kristof’s reporting to question the columnist’s biography and repeatedly published pieces about Kristof’s family members. In one piece, the Free Beacon suggested that his father’s time in Romanian military service “may help to explain why Kristof would be so eager to demonize Israel in particular,” because Romania fought against the Allies during World War II. A spokesperson for the Times called the insinuations “dangerous, inflammatory and most of all false,” saying that Kristof’s father had been drafted, and that his family spied on the Nazis.
- Washington public relations firm SKDK’s work on behalf of a pro-Israel organization included extensive opposition research work cataloguing tweets from a then-Washington Post reporter covering the Middle East.
- Opinion columnist Pamela Paul, when still at the Times, wrote a story on self-described detransitioners that the paper ran in the op-ed section. Framed more as a reported news story, the piece received some external scrutiny and criticism, though the paper stood by it.