BOOK REVIEW: HOW THE NYT DOWNPLAYED THE HOLOCAUST

A review of Laurel Leff's new book ("Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper") criticizing the New York Times for downplaying news of the Holocaust appeared i the New York Sun. Reviewer Ira Stoll describes it as "a fascinating biography of the man [Arthur Hays Sulzberger]who ran the Times during World War II and presided over what the paper has since acknowledged was its own botched coverage of the Nazi extermination of European Jewry". Read more about how a man clearly uncomfortable with his heritage managed to negatively influence crucial news coverage of that catastrophical time.

The review in the Weekly Standard is worth reading too.

"A GREAT DEAL HAS BEEN written about the failure of the Allies to forcibly respond to the Nazi destruction of European Jewry. But in recent years a number of historians have also noted the deficiencies of the American press in covering the evolving Holocaust. In particular, the New York Times has been accused of treating both the persecution and the subsequent annihilation of the Jews as a secondary story. As Laurel Leff notes in her compelling study of the Times's coverage of the Nazi war against the Jews, "No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than the Times and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so."

Leff chronicles how, from the start of the war in Europe in 1939 to its conclusion six years later, the Times published 1,186 stories about the Jews of Europe, but the unfolding genocide failed to "receive the continuous attention or prominent play that a story about the unprecedented attempt to wipe out an entire people deserved." She notes that the unfolding events that culminated in the Holocaust made the Times front page only 26 times, but in only six of those stories were Jews identified on the front page as the primary victims. Leff reports that on the rare occasions when the Holocaust made the front page, the Times obscured the fact that most of the victims were Jews, referring to

them as refugees or persecuted minorities. This remained the case even after December 17, 1942, when the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued a public statement that "the German authorities . . . are now carrying out into effect Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe"--thus eliminating the possibility for a skeptical press (including the Times) that atrocity reports reaching the West were either exaggerations or propaganda.