Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, on Wednesday filed a shareholder lawsuit against The New York Times Company, claiming the board’s lack of oversight over editorial practices is hurting state pension holders. Uthmeier said at a news conference in Doral, Fla., that the outlet’s credibility had been hurt by what he saw as anti-Israel bias in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The lawsuit demanded access to internal documents to determine whether the board allowed journalistic standards to be “weaponized within the company to serve the personal agendas of unchecked editors.”

Uthmeier said the 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 spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said in a statement that the company would defend itself vigorously, calling the lawsuit “a transparent attempt to exert agenda-driven pressure against an independent media organization.”

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. Florida holds about 145,000 shares of Times stock. The filing included reports from a former Times newsroom employee who raised concerns about anti-Israel bias. Uthmeier, a Republican appointed by Governor Ron De Santis in 2025, has emerged as an aggressive conservative culture warrior, also recently suing Starbucks and opening investigations into the NFL and MLB.