During the August 1 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly falsely claimed for at least the third time in recent weeks that The New York Times has “sat ... out editorially” the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. As Media Matters for America noted, O'Reilly claimed on the July 19 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor that the Times editorial board was “sitting ... out” the conflict, because in his estimation, "[m]any American Jews are liberal," and “the Times cannot afford to alienate its liberal base.” In fact, by then, the Times had published three editorials commenting on the conflict. On the July 24 Radio Factor, O'Reilly apparently modified his claim, stating that the Times was "basically sitting ... out" [emphasis added] the issue, dismissing the paper's July 18 editorial on the conflict, summarized below, as “just garbage.” O'Reilly then reverted to his claim that the Times was “absolutely sitting it out editorially” during that evening's O'Reilly Factor. From the time O'Reilly made the initial claim until the most recent instance on August 1, the Times published four more editorials on the conflict, bringing the total number to seven.

O'Reilly also baselessly claimed that The New York Times is “losing readers all over the place.” But the most recent available data do not indicate that the Times' readership has declined, as Media Matters recently documented. In fact, according to the latest report by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Times was one of only five newspapers in the top 25 nationwide that saw an increase in circulation during the most recent six-month period for which data are available, which ended in March.

Discussing media coverage of the conflict on August 1, O'Reilly stated: "[A]s I mentioned a few weeks ago, The New York Times, the L.A. Times in particular, those two newspapers, their base, their base are liberal Jewish Americans. And if -- you know, The New York Times pretty much sat this out editorially. They don't wanna have any part of this because they're hemorrhaging anyway. They're losing readers all over the place. And so is the L.A. Times."

In fact:

• On July 13, the Times published an editorial titled "Israel's Two-Front Battle," which criticized Hezbollah and Hamas's "[k]idnapping Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips for the release of Arab prisoners" and “lobbing rockets over Israel's borders” as being “horrible behavior for groups that claim international recognition and political legitimacy, as Hamas and Hezbollah do.” The editorial advised Israel to respond by “acting wisely and proportionately” by “focus[ing] military actions as narrowly as possible on those individuals, organizations and governments directly complicit in the attacks, while sparing the civilian populations that surround them.”
• The Times' July 15 editorial, titled "Playing Hamas's Game," argued that “Hamas and Hezbollah” are “not only who is responsible for the latest outbreak” of violence in the Middle East, “but who stands to gain most from its continued escalation.” The editorial, again, urged Israel to “focus its fire much more directly at the leaders and fighters of” Hamas and Hezbollah so as not to “end up advancing the political agenda that Hamas and Hezbollah hard-liners had in mind when they conceived and executed the kidnappings of Israeli soldiers that detonated the fighting.” An “inevitably fierce and devastating Israeli military response,” the Times editors argued, would give Hamas and Hezbollah “an opportunity to radicalize Arab politics and thereby pressure moderate Arab leaders to distance themselves from Israel and embrace the guerrilla cause.”
• In the July 18 editorial, "Diplomacy's Turn in Lebanon," which O'Reilly called “garbage,” the Times focused on diplomatic solutions to the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The editorial acknowledged that "[s]topping the fighting won't be easy" and that the “challenge for everyone else is to find a formula to achieve peacefully what just about every country apart from Syria and Iran now seems to agree has to happen,” the disarmament and political weakening of Hezbollah. The editorial board argued that, although everyone but Syria and Iran agrees that Hezbollah “should disarm its private militia, stop operating as a state within a state in southern Lebanon and allow the Lebanese government in Beirut to exercise the full sovereignty it has been denied for decades,” the U.N. Security Council needed to be “unified” in pushing these “provisions into reality.” The editorial concluded:

[T]he killing and human suffering can stop as soon as possible. Washington is right to press for the release of the Israeli soldiers held hostage. But this should not be a precondition for the earliest possible cease-fire. Many lives and the stability of the wider region depend on achieving a quick halt to the fighting.

• In a July 21 editorial, "More Than a Cease-Fire Needed," the Times urged a cease-fire between Lebanon and Israel, a U.N.-backed peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, and the disarming of Hezbollah by a Security Council resolution “order[ing] Syria and Iran to stop supplying their client” under penalty of international sanctions.
• The Times wrote on July 25 in "No More Foot-Dragging" that the region “urgently need[s] a cease-fire” as well as “the sort of aggressive diplomacy and international coalition building that the Bush administration typically disdains,” noting that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made her first visit to the Middle East nearly two weeks into the conflict.
• The Times published "A Right Way to Help Israel" on July 29, in which the newspaper argued that, while Israel's operations in southern Lebanon were justified by Hezbollah violence, its air campaign was doing more harm than good. The Times argued that a “better answer to the Hezbollah problem would be an immediate cease-fire, paving the way for an international force to patrol Lebanon's southern border.”
• In an editorial entitled "Cease-Fire Diplomacy in Lebanon" published August 1 -- the day O'Reilly repeated his false claim -- the Times asserted that it “took the worldwide uproar over the Qana casualties to finally jolt the Bush administration into asking for something it should have sought many days earlier” -- a temporary halt to Israel's air campaign in Lebanon. The Times argued that “the temporary lull in Israeli attacks needs to be broadened into a full cease-fire and extended indefinitely while the United Nations Security Council works to create an international armed force to secure Lebanon's border.”

From the August 1 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Because as I mentioned a few weeks ago, The New York Times, the L.A. Times in particular, those two newspapers, their base, their base are liberal Jewish Americans. And if -- you know, The New York Times pretty much sat this out editorially. They don't wanna have any part of this because they're hemorrhaging anyway. They're losing readers all over the place. And so is the L.A. Times.