The New York Times has quietly added editor’s notes to nine columns by failed Oregon gubernatorial candidate Nicholas Kristof after admitting that the veteran opinion writer repeatedly failed to disclose that people he quoted, or organizations he promoted, had financed his short-lived campaign.
The newspaper has called the omissions an oversight and says its review is complete, yet The National Pulse can reveal that none of the four favorable columns involving Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation identified in the original report was among those corrected, despite Gates and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, having given Kristof’s campaign $50,000 apiece.
KRISTOF AND THE TIMES.
Semafor broke the original story in June, finding at least a dozen instances in which Kristof had written about his own former supporters without telling readers about their donations. This, despite an explicit promise by the New York Times, when Kristof returned to the paper, that he would either refrain from writing about his supporters, or at least disclose the connection.
Kristof had left the Times in 2021 to seek the Democratic nomination for governor of Oregon, raising nearly $2.5 million before the Oregon Supreme Court unanimously upheld his exclusion from the ballot for failing to meet the state’s three-year residency requirement.
The Times’ Ethical Journalism Handbook requires staff members to avoid conduct that might “raise questions about their journalistic fairness and independence,” while also warning that political activity by a spouse or family member may create a conflict or the appearance of one.
Kristof nevertheless cited donors as authorities and promoted organizations connected to them without the promised disclosures.
He mentioned Deborah Fikes, who had given $10,000, in a 2024 column about North Korea; quoted McKinsey managing partner Bob Sternfels in a 2023 column about India without noting that Sternfels and his wife had given $5,000; and quoted the late Harvard professor Joseph Nye in columns about college admissions and China and Taiwan without mentioning Nye’s $1,000 contribution.
Larry Gilson, the founder of Focusing Philanthropy, gave $25,000 before Kristof featured the organization in his 2023, 2024 and 2025 giving guides. Vision to Learn appeared in the 2025 guide and a 2026 column even though its director, Joan Chu Reese, had donated $2,500 and Oregon Strong, the political action committee that received Kristof’s leftover campaign funds, had given the group $100,000. Kristof also wrote about CARE without disclosing that board members Michael Lynton and Richard Stengel had each contributed several thousand dollars.
Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander told Semafor that the donations “should have been made more clear to readers.” By July, the paper had completed its review and provided Fox News with nine columns carrying fresh editor’s notes.
THE GATES EXEMPTION.
Oregon campaign-finance reporting confirms that Bill and Melinda French Gates gave Kristof $50,000 each. Semafor identified four subsequent columns in which Kristof cited Gates, his foundation, its statistics or its recommendations without mentioning that $100,000 in political support.
In “Cheer Up! The World Is Better Off Than You Think,” published in December 2022, Kristof cited Gates’s prediction that a gene-editing technique being developed for sickle-cell disease might eventually offer a cure for HIV/AIDS. In May 2023, his column on an education “revolution” in Sierra Leone highlighted Gates’s praise for education minister Moinina David Sengeh and his book, Radical Inclusion.
Four months later, Kristof’s “Coming Soon in New York: Cocktails, Steak and Hypocrisy” promoted a Gates Foundation plan that he said could save two million mothers and children over a decade. The foundation’s 2023 Goalkeepers report called for policy changes, greater investment in women’s health and more health workers, including midwives.
In December 2025, Kristof cited the Gates Foundation’s estimate that deaths among children under five had risen by more than 200,000 that year and repeated Gates’s comparison of the dead to 5,000 classrooms of children. The foundation’s 2025 report was also a policy appeal to finance Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Global Fund. That position ran directly against Trump administration policy: its fiscal 2026 budget proposed no money for Gavi, while Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the United States would provide no further funding unless the organization changed its approach to vaccine safety.
These were more than passing references, too. Kristof used Gates or his foundation to validate factual claims, recommend a book, support a technology forecast and advance public-policy arguments involving foreign aid. None of the four columns disclosed the donations, and none was included among the nine pieces identified by the Times after its review.
In “The World Needs More Nick Kristofs”, Gates wrote that Kristof’s 1997 reporting on childhood deaths from diarrhea gave his philanthropy a mission and helped set the direction of the Gates Foundation. He also offered a warm endorsement of Kristof’s memoir, Chasing Hope. The two, in other words, are extremely close.
LEFTOVER CAMPAIGN CASH.
In August 2022, Kristof’s campaign transferred $992,031.78 to Oregon Strong. Rolling Stone reported that nearly half of his campaign haul remained under family control and quoted Kristof saying the new organization would be nonpolitical and finance job-training programs. State filings now classify Oregon Strong as a miscellaneous PAC that is not candidate-controlled and list Elizabeth Wilson, rather than Kristof or his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, as treasurer.
The transaction ledger records no contribution to a job-training program. Instead, its principal payments were $100,000 to Vision to Learn in 2023 and $2,000 to A Progressive Voice for Oregon in 2024. As of August 4, 2026, the official account summary showed $889,626.78 in cash and no activity during 2026. Kristof told Fox that he had not been involved with Oregon Strong since 2022, had “zero plans” to seek office again and believed the questions were a bad-faith attempt to discredit his journalism.
BEYOND THE DONATIONS.
Critics have also contrasted Kristof’s favorable treatment of Gates with his writing about Jeffrey Epstein’s associates. Kristof mentioned Donald Trump’s trips aboard Epstein’s aircraft in a 2023 column, mentioned former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at the 2025 DealBook Summit, and called for investigations of Trump and others in a February 2026 column, while acknowledging that the allegations he cited lacked evidence of wrongdoing.
But Kristof’s favorable Gates columns failed to mention Gates’s own, expansive dealings with Epstein. A Gates Foundation review identified roughly 30 meetings involving Epstein and 10 foundation leaders or staff, including Gates himself, between 2011 and 2014.
The Times’ own editor’s notes establish that its disclosure promise was repeatedly broken, but there are still questions. Why did a $1,000 donation from Joseph Nye require a correction, while $100,000 from Bill and Melinda French Gates did not? Until the newspaper explains these exceptions, its corrections address only part of the problem it acknowledged, and its credibility remains in tatters.
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