Unfreedom of the Press
Page 14
Surely the New York Times, with its wide reach, resources, access to foreign sources of information, reputation as the foremost newspaper in the country, large Jewish readership, and its Jewish ownership, would do everything possible to investigate and disclose the horrors of Jewish genocide. But the opposite was true. Wyman explained that “[t]he Times, Jewish-owned but anxious not to be seen as Jewish-oriented, was the premier American newspaper of the era. It printed a substantial amount of information on Holocaust-related events but almost always buried it on the inner pages. . . .” And the Washington Post? “The Jewish-owned Washington Post printed a few editorials advocating rescue, but only infrequently carried news reports on the European Jewish situation. The other Washington newspapers provided similarly limited information on the mass murder of European Jewry.”7 And most of the other press? “Outside New York and Washington, press coverage was even thinner. All major newspapers carried some Holocaust-related news, but it appeared infrequently and almost always in small items located on inside pages. . . . American mass-circulation magazines all but ignored the Holocaust. . . . Radio coverage of Holocaust news was sparse.”8
Emory University professor Deborah E. Lipstadt, in her book Beyond Belief, saw the media’s self-censorship during the Holocaust as a broadly institutional problem. She wrote that “the press bears a great measure of responsibility for the public’s skepticism and ignorance of the scope of the wartime tragedy [the Nazi mass murder of Jews]. The public’s doubts were strengthened and possibly even created by the manner in which the media told the story. If the press did not help plant the seeds of doubt in readers’ minds, it did little to eradicate them. During the war journalists frequently said that the news of deportations and executions did not come from eyewitnesses who could personally confirm what had happened and they, as journalists, were obliged to treat it skeptically. This explanation is faulty because much of the information came from German statements, broadcasts, and newspapers. If anything, these sources would have been inclined to deny, not verify, the news. Neutral sources also affirmed the reliability of reports. Moreover, even when the press did encounter witnesses, it often dismissed what they had to say because there were not considered ‘reliable’ or ‘impartial.’ ”9
Certainly by 1943 (and we now know by 1942), wrote Lipstadt, “the Nazi threat to ‘exterminate’ the Jews should have been understood as a literal one. There was little reason, in light of the abundance of evidence, to deny that multitudes were being murdered as part of a planned program of annihilation. But despite all the details there was a feeling among some correspondents, New York Times reporter Bill Lawrence most prominent among them, that the reports that Hitler and his followers had conducted a systematic extermination campaign were untrue. Lawrence did not doubt that Hitler had ‘treated the Jews badly, forcing many of them to flee to the sanctuaries of the West’; but even in October 1943—ten months after the Allied declaration confirming the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews . . .—he could not believe that the Nazis had murdered ‘millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies. . . . And those who might be mentally retarded.’ ”10
Lipstadt’s research also found that for much of the war, the Roosevelt administration whitewashed or deemphasized the Nazi eradication of Jews, and the mass media were compliant, regurgitating the government’s propaganda or suppressing the evidence. Lipstadt explained that “[t]he Office of War Information, working in tandem with the [Roosevelt] Administration, tried to severely limit any public attention paid to [the mass murder of the Jews]. Despite the fact that the Final Solution was the prime illustration of the enemy’s ‘strategy and principles,’ the Office of War Information wanted it to be avoided by news agencies and not mentioned in war propaganda. . . . The press mirrored the official policy of omitting mention of Jews or incorporating them into the general suffering faced by many other national groups. . . .”11
When Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin issued a formal declaration condemning Nazi atrocities, they were calculatedly silent about the active eradication of the Jews. Lipstadt emphasized: “Probably the most outrageous example of this explicit policy of ignoring the Jewish aspect of the tragedy occurred in Moscow in the fall of 1943. There, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met and affixed their signature to what is known as the Moscow Declaration,”12 which warned:
Germans who take part in the wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of the Cretan peasants, or who have shared in slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland or in the territories of the Soviet Union . . . will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged.13
“Nowhere in the declaration were the Jews even obliquely mentioned,” Lipstadt noted, “a phenomenon the press simply ignored.”14
Shockingly, the media’s cover-up continued nearly up to the war’s conclusion. Lipstadt wrote that “[e]ven when the war had virtually ended and the [death] camps were being liberated, reporters continued to incorporate the fate of the Jews into that of all other national groups that had been incarcerated and murdered at the camps” for the purpose of minimizing the targeted atrocities against the Jews and Hitler’s Final Solution.15
Taking direct aim at the New York Times, Professor Laurel Leff of Northeastern University, formerly a journalist, meticulously scrutinized not only the role of the media generally during the Holocaust, but the Times in particular. She has written extensively about “how the New York Times failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939 to 1945.”16 In her book Buried by the Times, she asks: “What was it about prevailing press standards and the policies and personalities at the Times that led the nation’s most important newspaper to discount one of the century’s most important news stories? . . . The Times was unique . . . in the comprehensiveness of its coverage and the extent of its influence among American opinion makers. . . . Because of its longtime commitment to international affairs, and its willingness to sacrifice advertising rather than articles in the face of a newsprint crunch, and its substantial Jewish readership, the Times was able to obtain and publish more news than other mainstream newspapers. The way the Times published that news also had a disproportionate impact on both policy makers and fellow journalists who considered it the newspaper of record. That the Times was owned by Jews of German ancestry, who would seemingly be more sensitive to the plight of their European brethren, further magnified the Times’ critical role in shaping contemporaneous coverage of the Holocaust.”17
Leff then makes this damning disclosure: “The Times’ judgment that the murder of millions of Jews was a relatively unimportant story reverberated among other journalists trying to assess the news, among Jewish groups trying to arouse public opinion, and among government leaders trying to decide on an American response.”18
The Times’ publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, intentionally and repeatedly buried news about the Holocaust deep within his paper, or ignored it altogether. Leff writes, “Although the war was the dominant news, it need not have been, and was not, the only front-page news. The New York Times printed between 12 and 15 front-page stories every day. Fewer than half of these typically concerned the war. . . . The Times’ first story on the Nazi extermination campaign, which described it as ‘the greatest mass slaughter in history,’ appeared on page five, tacked onto the bottom of a column of stories. Yet, the deaths of other civilians, often fewer than 100, regularly appeared on the front page.”19
Sulzberger’s personal philosophical views of Judaism also played a major part in his callous disengagement from the plight of the European Jews. “In the case of . . . Sulzberger,” writes Leff, “concerns about special pleading and dual loyalties were not purely a pragmatic calculation. They also reflected a deeply felt religious and philosophical belief that made Sulzberger resistant to changing his views in the light of changing circumstances. Being Jewish was solely a religious, not a racial or ethnic ori
entation, he maintained, that carried with it no special obligation to help fellow Jews. As anti-Semitism intensified in Germany, and to a lesser extent in America, he protested—a bit too vigorously perhaps—that Jews were just like any other citizen. They should not be persecuted as Jews, but they should not be rescued as Jews either. In fact, American Jews who helped other Jews because they were Jews threatened to undercut their position as Americans, Sulzberger believed. The Times publisher thus was philosophically opposed to emphasizing the unique plight of the Jews in occupied Europe, a conviction that at least partially explains the Times’ tendency to place stories about Jews inside the paper, and to universalize their plight [that is, not identifying them specifically] in editorials and front-page stories.”20
Incredibly, Sulzberger’s personal dislike of certain Jewish leaders and opposition to their efforts to establish a Jewish state in the original Jewish homeland further soured him and, hence, the Times’ coverage of the Holocaust. Leff wrote that “Sulzberger’s involvement with the American Jewish community also led him to be less inclined to emphasize the Jews’ fate. His antipathy for Jewish leaders in the United States and Palestine tempered somewhat his sympathy for persecuted Jews in Europe.”21 Sulzberger’s opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine “drew the publisher into fierce, public fights with American Jewry’s top leaders that colored his views not only of their activities on behalf of a Jewish state, but also of other efforts on behalf of European Jews. . . .”22
Indeed, Leff’s research, like that of Wyman and Lipstadt, found that the Times and the media overall withheld or buried much of what they knew about the Holocaust from the American public. “The way the press in general and the Times in particular presented the facts played an important role in creating the gap between information and action. . . . The way the Times and the rest of the mass media told the story of the Holocaust engendered no chance of arousing public opinion. . . . [T]he Times never treated the news of the Holocaust as important—or at least as important as, say, informing motorists to visit the Office of Price Administration if they did not have their automobile registration number and state written on their gasoline ration coupons. A story about that possible bureaucratic snafu appears on the front page on March 2, 1944, the same day that the ‘last voice from the abyss’ was relegated to page four.”23
Moreover, it deserves emphasizing that the Roosevelt administration, and its determination to censor news directly related to the plight of the Jews, was a key factor in influencing how the press behaved. “[T]he government did not have to give publishers’ and editors’ special instructions. The government influenced the coverage by directing the flow of information, issuing statements about certain subjects, keeping quiet about others, playing up parts of the war, and downplaying others. A press corps that tended to define news as government actions would have gone along. The government’s message that nothing special should be done to save the Jews also found a receptive journalistic audience.”24 At the Times, “[t]he second most influential Timesman on political issues went a step further; Washington Bureau Chief and columnist Arthur Krock allied himself with the forces in the State Department working hardest to stifle any rescue efforts. . . .”25
On November 14, 2001, before the release of Leff’s book, but several years after the publication of Wyman’s and Lipstadt’s books, Max Frankel, who had worked for the New York Times for fifty years and served as executive editor from 1986 to 1994, penned an opinion piece in the Times titled “150th Anniversary: 1851–2001; Turning Away from the Holocaust.” It appears to be the first attempted thoroughgoing engagement by the Times of its “staggering, staining failure . . . to depict Hitler’s methodical extermination of the Jews of Europe as a horror beyond all other horrors in World War II—a Nazi war within the war crying out for illumination.”26
Frankel asked: “Why, then, were the terrifying tales almost hidden in the back pages? Like most—though not all—American media, and most of official Washington, the Times drowned its reports about the fate of the Jews in the flood of wartime news. . . . Only six times in nearly six years did the Times’s front page mention Jews as Hitler’s unique target for total annihilation. Only once was their fate the subject of a lead editorial. Only twice did their rescue inspire passionate cries in the Sunday magazine.”27
Obviously, Frankel had read the scholarly research presented by, among others, Wyman and Lipstadt (he acknowledged the latter), stating that “[t]his reticence has been a subject of extensive scholarly inquiry and also much speculation and condemnation.” He goes on: critics have blamed “ ‘self-hating Jews’ and ‘anti-Zionists’ among the paper’s owners and staff. Defenders have cited the sketchiness of much information about the death camps in Eastern Europe and also the inability of prewar generations to fully comprehend the industrial gassing of millions of innocents by those chilling mounds of Jews’ bones, hair, shoes, rings.”28
Frankel goes through most of the various scenarios already presented by the earlier authors, noting that “[n]o single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century’s biggest journalistic failure.” But he also draws attention to some of the articles the Times did run “[o]n its dense inside pages.” Nonetheless, Frankel points out, “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 ordinary reader of its pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend the enormity of the Nazis’ crime.”29
Frankel concluded his piece by assuring readers that the Sulzberger family and the News York Times corporation had learned their lessons: “After the Nazis’ slaughter of the Jews was fully exposed at war’s end, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, the influential daughter, wife and mother of Times publishers, changed her mind about the need for a Jewish state and helped her husband, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, accept the idea of Israel and befriended its leaders. Later, led by their son, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, and their grandson, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the Times shed its insensitivity about its Jewish roots, allowed Jews to ascend to the editor’s chair and warmly supported Israel in many editorials.”30
But the Sulzbergers knew far more than Frankel suggests in this vague and self-serving declaration. He failed to mention a rather pertinent fact raised in a paper published by the Shorenstein Center: “[W]hile downplaying in the Times to a ludicrous degree the Jewish identity of the victims of some Nazi horrors (an editorial about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising somehow managed to omit that it was a ghetto of Jews), Arthur and Iphigene worked diligently to help distant relatives still in Germany emigrate to the United States. They surely understood these people were in danger from Hitler because of something more than their ‘choice’ to subscribe to the Jewish, rather than say, the Lutheran, religion.” Therefore, the Times publisher and his wife knew well of the dire plight of the European Jews from their own personal information and personal actions and still downplayed the Holocaust in real time and opposed efforts to establish a Jewish state.31
Indeed, the Zionist movement had been under way since at least the late nineteenth century. The Times published throughout this period. At the end of World War II and after the death of Roosevelt, in 1945 the United States endorsed the establishment of a Jewish state; after decades of war, the state of Israel was founded by the Jewish people on May 14, 1948. All of this came together no thanks to the reporting of the Times and the directives of the Sulzberger family but in spite of them.
Frankel ended his piece with an assurance to the readers: “And to this day the failure of America’s media to fasten upon Hitler’s mad atrocities stirs the conscience of succeeding generations of reporters and editors. It has made them acutely alert to ethnic barbarities in far-off places like Uganda, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. It leaves them obviously resolved that in the face of genocide, journalism shall not have failed in vain.”32
In significant ways, however, the attitudes and even antipathy prevalent at the Times, in many newsrooms, and among many journalists and
commentators during that period do not appear to have substantially receded. In fact, since the Israelis won the Six-Day War in 1967, demonstrating that they can and will successfully fight for their survival, Israel has been their regular target.
For example, on June 1, 2006, former New York City mayor Ed Koch wrote an opinion piece in the Times titled “The New York Times’ Anti-Israel Bias,” asserting that “[t]he British Broadcasting Corporation and The New York Times consistently carry news stories and editorials that are slanted against Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.” Koch eviscerated the Times: “What idiocy on the part of the Times. Of course, the Palestinian people should be punished for their election decision [the election of the terrorist group Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza]. That same view—not to criticize or take action—was in vogue in 1932 and thereafter following Hitler’s democratic victory in Germany when he became the lawful Chancellor of the German government and began his war against the Jews and later the nations of Europe. Had the German nation been criticized and punished for electing Hitler in 1932, the world may have been spared the slaughter by the Nazis of 50 million people including six million Jews. All of this historical background was ignored by the Times and it was ignored by the BBC anchor in his commentary when he simply stated, ‘Israel has not recognized the new Hamas government and Hamas does not recognize the existence of Israel.’ ” Koch finished his piece with this: “In the 1930s and ’40s, the critical failure of The Times, reported on and acknowledged by The Times after World War II, was its omission to adequately report on the murderous war against the Jews undertaken by Hitler and his Nazi government.” “In my opinion, The Times, editorially, is back to where it was in the ’30s and ’40s—unconcerned with Hamas’ stated goal of destroying the Jewish nation.”33