I decided to do this as a note instead of an article. It was originally posted to Facebook.

Got tagged in a post earlier. Just a quick write-up about a woman named Kathleen Kingsbury. The kind of thing you read in about 45 seconds and think yeah, okay, but who is she really? So down the rabbit hole it went.

Kingsbury is the Opinion Editor of the New York Times. She doesn’t write the columns. She doesn’t go on television. But she decides what the most widely read opinion section in American journalism publishes, and she has been doing it for five years.

Her official bio reads like a highlight reel. Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, sometimes called the West Point of the American diplomatic corps. Columbia Journalism School on a prestigious fellowship. A Pulitzer Prize at the Boston Globe for a series on restaurant workers. Joined the Times in 2017, took over the opinion section in 2020, Pulitzer finalist twice since then.

That’s the version she put out there.

Before she became an editor, Kingsbury worked as a program officer at the Open Society Foundations, a progressive global philanthropy. That does not appear anywhere in her official biography. Her father is Thomas Kingsbury, the former CEO of Burlington Stores and later Kohl’s, who retired controlling shares in Burlington worth over $166 million. The daughter of one of America’s wealthiest retail executives spent her career championing working-class causes and progressive politics from one of the most powerful editorial chairs in the country.

The nuclear war series she earned a Pulitzer finalist nod for was not funded by the New York Times. It was funded through outside grants from the Carnegie Corporation, the Outrider Foundation, and the Prospect Hill Foundation, three organizations that exist specifically to shape public opinion on nuclear disarmament and related policy. Advocacy foundations with specific policy goals paid for an opinion series in the paper of record on those exact goals. The Times prints a small disclosure at the bottom of those pieces. Kingsbury lists the award in her bio.

The most revealing part of her tenure is the personnel record.

When she assumed control of the opinion section in 2020, three of the most prominent pro-Israel voices on the staff were gone within months. Editorial page editor James Bennet was forced out. Opinion writer Bari Weiss resigned, writing in her letter that colleagues had called her a Nazi and a racist, and that the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you will be hung out to dry. Opinion staffer Adam Rubenstein was gone too. Kingsbury’s public response to Weiss leaving was a brief statement pledging commitment to voices from across the political spectrum.

The person elevated to fill that void was Max Strasser, whom Kingsbury promoted to senior editor overseeing international coverage and later to Sunday Opinion editor. Strasser had publicly written that the idea of a state officially defined as Jewish is in conflict with the worldviews of many in my generation, tweeted enthusiastic support for a prominent journalist’s public renunciation of Zionism, and called a sympathetic piece on the BDS movement the smartest and most nuanced piece he had seen on the subject. Under Kingsbury’s watch, editors were reportedly told they could refuse to edit pieces they personally disagreed with and could flag articles for additional ideological review.

In 2020, when Kingsbury was running the Democratic primary endorsement process, she pressed every candidate on whether they would reverse Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. She asked Amy Klobuchar the question twice, even after Klobuchar said she supported keeping the embassy there. Moving the embassy back was not a standard Democratic platform issue at the time. Kingsbury made it part of the process.

When over 1,000 Times contributors signed an open letter in 2023 protesting the paper’s coverage of transgender issues, Kingsbury and the executive editor sent a memo the following day saying the paper would not tolerate staff participating in advocacy protests. She had already personally written a Times piece calling transgender youth’s gender identity a phase and had cracked down on staff who pushed back on the section’s editorial direction.

Then there’s the Kristof column, which is what started all of this.

It was published the evening before Israel released a 300-page civil commission report documenting Hamas’s systematic sexual atrocities on October 7 and against hostages held in Gaza. That report had been sent to the Times weeks in advance. The Times did not cover it. What the Times did publish was a piece built on a Hamas-linked NGO, featuring a lead source who had celebrated October 7 on social media, and including an allegation that canine behavior experts called physically implausible. Kingsbury’s section produced an accompanying video, put it on the homepage, and publicly defended it when the backlash came from Israel, from Jewish organizations, from journalism watchdogs, and from some Palestinian voices who questioned the sourcing.

Two sets of allegations about sexual violence. One backed by hundreds of interviews and thousands of photographs. The other built on anonymous sources and organizations with documented Hamas ties. The Times passed on the first and produced a multimedia package for the second.

Her official bio lists the degrees, the awards, the titles. It leaves out the editors who were gone after she took over, the outside money that funded her marquee series, the internal crackdowns on staff who objected to editorial direction, and the column now at the center of a threatened defamation lawsuit from the government of Israel.

Got tagged in a post. Read a brief. Went looking. This is what I found…for now.