The latest revelations surrounding the New York Times’ internal memo on reporting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stand as a damning indictment of the paper’s abdication of its fundamental duty — to speak truth to power, no matter the consequences.

The Times’ directive to its staff, instructing them to avoid using terms like “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “occupied territory,” and even “Palestine,” is a betrayal of the very principles that underpin a free and independent press. For an institution that purports to be the “newspaper of record,” this memo is a sordid exercise in linguistic gymnastics, a transparent attempt to obfuscate the realities of a conflict that has seen over 20,000 Palestinians killed, with countless more wounded and displaced.