Biotech heiress Nika Soon-Shiong announced on Monday that she was booted from the Committee to Protect Journalists' board of directors and blamed a Washington Free Beacon report on her anti-Israel activism for prompting the embattled organization to cut ties.
Soon-Shiong—the publisher of Drop Site News and daughter of the South African biotech billionaire and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong—wrote she was informed Sunday evening that the CPJ nixed her board position as the New York-based advocacy group faces mounting pressure over its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza, which has included dozens of confirmed military operatives for Hamas and other jihadist groups.
The CPJ now says it’s conducting a "full review of its database" after Hamas and other terrorist groups publicly claimed many of the slain "journalists" as their own.
The ongoing scandal deepened last month after the Free Beacon reported that the CPJ had been quietly removing some militants’ names from its list of deceased "journalists" without publicly acknowledging the changes, and that the CPJ’s board of directors is brimming with anti-Israel sentiment with virtually no dissenting voices. The Free Beacon extensively documented Soon-Shiong’s outlandish accusations that Israel is an "apartheid" state committing "genocide in Gaza," and that "a Palestinian child is being murdered every ten minutes," among other similar claims. The Free Beacon report also noted how board member Maria Ressa has compared Israel’s actions to those of Hitler, and how during her 2024 commencement address at Harvard, she used antisemitic tropes about "money and power" to cast shade on her critics.
The Free Beacon further reported that the CPJ’s vice chair, New York Times opinion writer Lydia Polgreen, claimed last year in the Times that Israel assassinated a "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist." Even though Israel has released voluminous documentation that the dead man was a Hamas fighter—including producing a picture of him with late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—Polgreen insisted there was "no credible evidence" that the man fought for the terror group.
The Free Beacon’s report led to arguments among CPJ board members, Soon-Shiong wrote on X, and her objections to reviewing the list of slain "journalists" resulted in her being terminated from the board.
I have been informed that I'm no longer a member of the Committee to Protect Journalists board. Below is the email I sent the board last night. pic.twitter.com/jWCIMCOpf7
— Dr. Nika Soon-Shiong (@nikasoonshiong) June 29, 2026
In a rambling open letter, Soon-Shiong excoriated the Free Beacon for citing her own past remarks, claimed it is not a fact that "Hamas wants to kill all Jews," and equated the Israel Defense Forces to designated terror outfits like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
"The proposal to exclude journalists who exhibit certain ‘behaviors and activities’ or who work for ‘state-backed propaganda outlets, militant- and designated terror-affiliated organizations’ emerged from our discussion of Adam Kredo's Free Beacon article alleging I am too vocal against genocide and apartheid." Kredo, she added, "placed me on the cover and accused me of terrorism by virtue of my role as publisher for an ‘extremist’ outlet."
Drop Site News is a far-left outlet that has come under fire for demonizing Israel and adopting Hamas's own language about the Gaza conflict.
"What should happen to NYT or CNN reporters who have children serving in the IDF, or mentor journalists to help Israel win an ‘information war’?" Soon-Shiong wrote. "What should happen to outlets like The Atlantic, LA Times, or BBC where editors served in the IDF directly? CPJ cannot credibly position itself as an objective judge of who is a legitimate journalist and what merits protection. It certainly cannot do so while stating that ‘Hamas wants to kill all Jews’ as if it is fact."
The slain Gaza "journalists" themselves—many of whom are now confirmed, often by their own families, to have been active combatants—should not be excluded from the CPJ’s list solely for these affiliations, Soon-Shiong wrote.
"How could CPJ's response place scrutiny on the journalists themselves—as though they were somehow responsible for their own deaths—even after they had been killed? Permanent reputational damage of doing so might undermine the impartiality and credibility on which CPJ's work rests."
Prior to her ouster, Soon-Shiong asked the CPJ board to pause its review and hold a "vote on whether to proceed with this effort, given the absence of a clear objective, defined scope of work, or assessment of the potential institutional risks."
Soon-Shiong wrote that the Free Beacon’s reporting prompted the CPJ to internally reconsider the methodology behind its list of journalists killed in Gaza. That discussion now appears to have resulted in the CPJ’s low-key announcement last week that it is conducting the "full review of its database."
Soon-Shiong warned the CPJ against revising its criteria, maintaining that Gaza journalists should not be penalized for associating with known terror groups.
"Reopening the question of ‘who is a journalist’ carries profound implications for the individuals CPJ protects and for the organizations with which they are affiliated," she wrote. "It's a betrayal to our colleagues in Gaza who have faced the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded. Because baseless accusations will become more common, not less, CPJ must strive to rise above the fray."
The CPJ, Soon-Shiong wrote, "already counts journalists who do not directly participate in armed combat as civilians in accordance with international law." At the institutional level, the CJP’s "database records the outlets and organizations with which journalists are affiliated at the time they are killed, imprisoned, or disappear. Is the proposal to deny protection based on these affiliations? Upon what criteria? Why were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad the only two entities listed in the Press Release?"
The open letter—and the CPJ’s review of the Gaza list—comes amid longstanding concerns the oft-cited advocacy group has done little to verify the accuracy of its list. The organization has already publicly admitted nixing the names of 20 slain Gaza "journalists" after their membership in terror groups became clear, though the "full review" announced last week suggests that the advocacy organization’s entire methodology may be faulty.
The CPJ declined to explain to the Free Beacon what exactly prompted the review, or address Soon-Shiong’s letter. Members of the CPJ’s board from prestigious legacy media organizations—including the Times, NBC News, the Atlantic and the New Yorker—have also remained silent for more than three years as the CPJ evolved from a broad-based group advocating for journalists' safety worldwide into a partisan, anti-Israel organization focused overwhelmingly on the Gaza conflict. The CPJ’s reputation has taken repeated blows as watchdog groups like HonestReporting expose constant revisions and corrections to a database that has long been used to delegitimize Israel’s operations in Gaza.
The CJP said in its June 25 announcement that it is "conducting a full review of its database of journalists killed during the Israel-Gaza War after militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) published obituaries identifying as combatants individuals previously listed by CPJ as journalists." The organization still maintains, however, that 209 "journalists or media workers" have either been killed by Israel or are being held in detention centers.
"CPJ has always been clear that we do not include anyone in our data sets if there is evidence that they were engaging in combat or inciting imminent violence," CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said in a statement. "This is consistent with international humanitarian law, which considers journalists affiliated with non-state actors to be civilians, provided they do not directly participate in hostilities." A CPJ spokesman told the Free Beacon that "we have no further comment" on the matter beyond the online posting.
Both the CPJ and its Gaza "journalists" list were thrust into the spotlight earlier this year after Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cited its claims about detained Palestinian journalists being sexually assaulted by Israeli troops as a linchpin of his sordid column claiming two Palestinian "journalists" were raped, separately, with a carrot and a dog while in Israeli custody. Kristof described the CPJ as "a respected American organization" but did not mention that it has faced persistent accusations of bias for repeatedly including known terrorists on its list of slain journalists.
In addition to Soon-Shiong, Ressa, and Polgreen, other CPJ board members include Times vice president and general counsel Diane Brayton, along with NBC News "president, editorial" Rebecca Blumenstein, a Times alumna. Both news outlets have relied heavily on the CPJ, uncritically citing its often inflammatory accusations against Israel.
A June 20 report from NBC News that ran under the headline "Al Jazeera cameraman killed in Gaza months after his journalist brother died in a separate strike" detailed Israel’s recent strike on a Hamas sniper, Ahmed Samir Muhammad Washah, who also worked as a cameraman for Al Jazeera. Washah’s brother was also an Al Jazeera employee whose real job was serving as a Hamas bombmaker. The IDF first identified the brothers as Hamas militants, but their roles as military operatives was later confirmed in videos released by the men’s friends and family in tributes.
The NBC News piece leaned heavily on the CPJ claims, adding, regarding Washah’s brother, that "a source close to Hamas also told the CPJ that the correspondent had no affiliation with the organization." NBC did not update its piece once video was released showing Ahmed Samir Muhammad Washah firing an automatic rifle and posing with a sniper rifle with a huge sight while wearing a jihadist militant headband.
CPJ board member Blumenstein’s oversight at NBC News—while notably murky when it comes to the core television product—does include articles published on NBCNews.com, such as the one in question. (The NBCNews.com article’s writer, breaking news reporter Mirna Alsharif, says in her author biography that she is "passionate about reporting on race and religion, mainly the marginalization of minority communities in the U.S.")
NBC News and the New York Times did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment on the CPJ’s review or concerns they may have about the organization’s methodology.
While it is unclear beyond the Free Beacon report what exactly prompted the CPJ to act, it has faced numerous embarrassing mistakes in recent months.
Mohamed Skheil, who was touted by the CPJ as an "editor and graphic designer," was confirmed last week to be a commander with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Hamas-affiliated offshoot. Skheil was killed inside Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024 and his true identity became clear when the terror group celebrated him as a martyr, according to Salo Aizenberg, who works with the HonestReporting watchdog group.
Just one recent example of the egregious abuse of the press vest by Gazan terrorist groups while Western media provided cover for this tactic because admitting the truth would be devasating to the Israel=Evil narrative. Hezbollah uses the same playbook. https://t.co/iG39tr4EC8
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) June 28, 2026
Tarek Skheil, another CPJ-endorsed journalist who the organization claimed was a reporter with Al-Quds Radio, was confirmed by PIJ to be the commander of a training group stationed around Al-Shifa Hospital, where Skheil was killed in 2024.
🧵PIJ admitted today that ANOTHER of its commanders posed as a "journalist" and used Shifa Hospital as a base!
Tarek Skheil was killed along with fake journalist & relative Mohamed Skheil, also with many combatants inside the hospital on Mar 18, 2024—as IDF said all along. 1/ pic.twitter.com/MzojyYBeeZ
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) June 28, 2026
Justin Pozmanter, HonestReporting’s news director, said that the CPJ’s review "is the bare minimum requirement towards acknowledging they've been misleading readers and falsely demonizing Israel for almost three years."
"HonestReporting board member Salo Aizenberg has been one of the leading researchers exposing this farce of a list," he added. "If we could use publicly available information to prove these ‘journalists’ were actually terrorists, why couldn't the fact checkers and editors of these behemoth, multinational news organizations do the same? Did they not care to look? Or, would exposing the facts have simply undermined their ability to promote their overall narrative?"
