Florida’s attorney general on Wednesday filed a shareholder lawsuit against The New York Times Company, claiming that the board of directors’ lack of oversight of the paper’s editorial practices is hurting state pension holders who have stock in the company.
The attorney general, James Uthmeier, said at a news conference in Doral, Fla., that the outlet’s credibility had been hurt in particular by what he saw as an anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
The lawsuit demanded access to internal documents in an attempt to determine whether the company’s board of directors had allowed journalistic standards to be “weaponized within the company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.”
Mr. Uthmeier said at the news conference that this legal filing was not a defamation suit, but a case about a company’s duties to shareholders.
“When you’re a news agency, your credibility is everything,” he said. “The New York Times tells its own investors that its brand and reputation are its most important assets.”
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times, said in a statement that the company would defend itself vigorously.
“This lawsuit has no merit and was brought for an improper purpose,” he said. “Although it is positioned as a corporate governance petition to inspect the company’s books and records, it is a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization, level false allegations of bias and chill journalism protected by the First Amendment.”
The lawsuit was jointly filed in New York County Supreme Court by the State Board of Administration of Florida, which oversees Florida’s pension fund, and the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank. According to the fund’s most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Florida holds about 145,000 shares of Times stock.
The legal filing included reports from a person, identified in the filing as a former Times newsroom employee, who said she had raised concerns about anti-Israel bias in coverage of the Israel-Hamas war on numerous occasions and felt that the company’s internal mechanisms for standards had failed.
The announcement comes as Mr. Uthmeier, a Republican, runs to retain his seat as attorney general. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, appointed Mr. Uthmeier to the role in 2025.
As attorney general, Mr. Uthmeier has emerged as an aggressive conservative culture warrior, frequently holding news conferences to announce investigations or lawsuits against companies or institutions. This week, his office announced a settlement with Starbucks after suing the company, accusing it of violating a state anti-discrimination law by favoring the hiring of minorities.
He has also opened investigations into the National Football League over practices encouraging the hiring of minorities, and Major League Baseball, which he suggested discriminated against players on religious grounds by reprimanding Christian players for writing Bible verses on their caps on Pride Night. The outcomes of those investigations remained unclear on Wednesday.
Last month, Mr. Uthmeier sent a letter to the Times Company making similar demands for the records. The company refused.
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