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Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important
Newspaper

Commentary ^ | May, '05 | Daniel Johnson

Posted on 02/24/2008 5:46:33 PM PST by T.L.Sink

This book tells the story about how the most powerful newspaper in the
world failed to inform its readers that the most horrible crime in
history was taking place in occupied Europe. The New York Times did
not ignore the Nazi persecution of the Jews but its failure was to
make no distinction between random persecution and genocide. Laurel
Leff demonstrates that the correspondents, the editors, and,
especially the publisher of the Times, had the information they needed
in order to grasp what was going on. Yet they quite cold-bloodedly
downplayed the scale and significance of the unfolding tragedy; not
inadvertently but as a matter of policy. For the Times the holocaust
was not a story. The newspaper would have been obliged, through its
news columns and editorial pages to raise the national consciousness
and thereby put pressure on the U.S. government to save as many Jews
as possible. That, however, was precisely what Arthur Sulzberger, the
publisher, and his senior staff were determined not to do. Protests on
behalf of Jews, even by non-Jewish organizations, were played down,
and acts of resistance by Jews went all but ignored. Even the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising in 1943, made it onto the front page only once. By the
time the dimensions of the Jewish calamity were officially confirmed
by the State Department in November 1942, the reaction of the Times
was to bury the story on page ten. In other words, as between
oppressors and oppressed, the great organ of American LIBERALISM would
remain fastidiously neutral. The Times betrayed the Jews of Europe by
abandoning them. It betrayed its American readers by misleading them.
And it betrayed its own self-exalted image by failing utterly to
discharge its public responsibility in reporting the Final Solution.