Wednesday, July 14, 2010

So, What Do I Have Against The New York Times?

From here:


Years ago I had the privilege of auditing a class on the Holocaust with Eli Wiesel at the BU Divinity School, and came across a research article by a journalism professor, Dr. Laurel Leff that I never forgot. While it was happening, and something could have been done, the New York Times had a deliberate policy to bury news of the Holocaust. The Times published the reports of the roundups, the gas chambers, the death toll, but by telling the news in a few sentences, in inch-high articles, on inside pages, they deliberately insured that the public didn’t understand that the Jews of Europe were being massacred.

While this sorry story of illegitimate journalism is unknown to the general public, the record of the New York Times, like the rest of Holocaust history, is exhaustively documented. On their 100th anniversary and 150th anniversary, the New York Time’s admitted it had “buried” the news of the Holocaust. It has been the subject of a museum exhibit, turned into a documentary; with interviews of top
journalists and Holocaust experts. In 2005 Dr. Leff published a full page book on the subject, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper.

There is universal consensus on the facts. New York Time’s retired executive editor Max Frankel nailed it this way on November, 2001, in their full-page 150th anniversary self-assessment, “Turning Away from the Holocaust.”: “No article about the Jews’ plight ever qualified as the Times’ leading story of the day, or as a major event of a week or year.” The Times ran only five editorials that mentioned Europe’s Jews out of more than 17,000 during the war. Readers of the Times would
not know that the Warsaw Uprising involved Jews. The Time’s consistently editorialized in favor of President Roosevelt’s decisions to bar European Jews trying to flee the death camps.

When the death camps were liberated, Eisenhower summoned the nation’s top editors and publishers to join him as eyewitnesses. The Times sent Julius Ochs Adler, vice president and another family member of the Times dynasty. His account of Buchenwald ran on page six.

Max Frankel called the Times decision to bury the news of the Holocaust ‘the bitterest journalistic failure of the century,’ a tragedy that abetted Hitler’s genocide. He admitted the policy was directed by publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, for both political and personal reasons. Sulzberger didn’t want Jews to be considered a people, with a right to a homeland in Israel; he didn’t want his paper
criticized as Jewish; and he didn’t approve of Jews helping fellow Jews. He didn’t want any daylight between his paper and FDR, including FDR’s policy to ignore the ongoing Holocaust. Frankel asserted that having learned this lesson of past failure, the Times has since ‘shed its sensitivity about its Jewish roots’ and dropped its hostility to Israel.

Frankel quoted Dr. Leff extensively. He characterized her as “the most diligent independent student of the Times’ Holocaust coverage.” Leff documented how The New York Times, which defined the Holocaust as a non-story for the national media, made it impossible for Jewish groups during the war to galvanize the public or politicians to do anything for Hitler’s Jewish victims.

Legendary New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal (promoted to editor in 1961, he was forbidden to use his full name, Abraham, as it was too Jewish for the Times) was asked in a 2001 interview aired on the History Chanel, to review the Time’s Holocaust coverage. “…it was no good. It was paltry. It was embarrassing. It was wrong. It was morally and journalistically wrong…If the Times had come out big on
this, that would have brought a lot more attention in the country.”



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1 comment:

Juniper in the Desert said...

What other people have not only to fight their enemies without, but those within?