The New York Times Company took roughly $45 million from the same research tax credit its reporters faulted Meta for claiming, while dressing up the tech giant’s filings as risky accounting tricks.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the New York Times Company reaped $47.65 million in research and development tax credit benefits from 2021 to 2025, even as the paper attacked Meta for relying on the same break.
Days earlier, the Times published a multi-byline story on Meta’s research tax credits tied to AI data centers. The piece leaned on loaded framing, “exploiting a lucrative tax break,” “untested accounting magic,” and a bar chart titled “How Meta’s research tax credits have exploded in recent years.”
That contrast is the story. The paper cast Meta’s use of a long-standing federal credit as something shady. Its own parent company used the credit too, and booked tens of millions from it.
The Times article opened around Mark Zuckerberg and argued Meta’s accountants knew the strategy sat on shaky ground. It pointed to securities disclosures warning that billions in tax savings could be overturned by the I.R.S., citing “uncertainties with our research tax credits.”
Free Beacon writer Ira Stoll put the double standard to the paper directly. He emailed the Times authors and asked how Meta’s conduct differed from the Times Company’s own R&D credits, including work on projects like remote access to a virtual New York Times museum.
A Medium/Open Times piece described that project as a proof-of-concept meant to bring the internal company museum in the New York office to remote employees. Designers said they wanted to “reduce the cognitive load for visitors and prominent artifacts so visitors are not overwhelmed when they enter the virtual museum.”
That is the kind of internal tech work the company can route through research credit rules. The Free Beacon’s point was simple: the Times treated Meta’s credit claims as suspect theater, then benefited from the same statute for its own projects.
Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander answered Stoll’s challenge without denying the company’s use of the credit.
Stadtlander said:
"The Times's reporting on Meta's claiming of billions in tax credits is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with Meta's operations, tax credit experts, and citations of Meta's own securities filings that clearly outline the billions of dollars in risk these claims introduce. Incisive and revealing journalism like this performs a vital role in helping the public understand how one of the largest companies shaping the economy conducts itself. The Times is confident that our approach to R&E credits is appropriate."
In other words, Meta’s filings supposedly justified the scare language. The Times Company’s filings, in this telling, did not require the same tone.
The company’s 2025 Form 10-K still flagged tax risk of its own. Free Beacon noted more than $78 million in “other liabilities,” a bucket the filing said primarily included self-insurance liabilities, post-employment liabilities, and “contingent tax liability for uncertain tax positions.”
Readers of the Meta piece got a morality play. Investors in Times Co. got the quieter disclosure line.
The Times coverage also fed a predictable comment-section script. One Reader Pick comment, with 795 upvotes, called Meta’s approach “absolute corrupt use of accounting and legal tricks” and tied it to Trump and Zuckerberg. Another Reader Pick comment from Spain claimed Meta could make the bet “because of who is in office and their ability to buy him.”
That is what loaded framing buys. Call a legal credit “accounting magic,” and parts of the audience hear corruption rather than tax code design.
The Free Beacon’s comparison cut the other way. If the credit is legitimate policy, Meta is not uniquely sinful for using it. If the credit is a scandal, the Times Company is in the same arena, just with smaller numbers and friendlier coverage of itself.
The hypocrisy runs backward in time, not only across the Meta story.
In a 2010 column, Thomas Friedman relayed Intel chief executive Paul Otellini’s pitch that government should boost the research and development tax credit by 5 percent and lower corporate taxes. Friedman presented that as hardheaded advice from a flagship American firm.
In 2007, a Times blog post by Bruce Bartlett listed “making the research and development tax credit permanent,” a proposal associated with then-Finance Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, among ideas that could draw bipartisan support.
So the institutional memory is not “research credits are a dirty loophole.” It is closer to “research credits are a normal lever”, until the target is Meta and the headline needs heat.
Free Beacon also placed the episode against the Sulzberger family’s control of the Times and the paper’s broader posture on transparency and power. The company can scold a tech platform for aggressive tax positioning while it harvests the same credit and keeps its own contingent tax liabilities in the fine print.
Scale still differs. Meta’s claims were described in the billions; Times Co.’s reported benefit was $47.65 million across five years, with the $45 million figure used in the headline and in Stoll’s email. The principle does not shrink with the total.
A research credit is either a lawful incentive or a dodge. It is not a dodge only when Zuckerberg’s name is on the building and a virtue when the beneficiary is the New York Times Company.
Elite newsrooms want the moral high ground and the tax tool. Voters and readers are tired of getting only one half of that deal explained.
