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Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, by Laurel Leff

The devil is the details in Laurel Leff’s prodigiously researched examination of how the New York Times, through story placement and editorial judgment, consciously downplayed news about the fate of European Jews from 1939 to 1945. In her account of the Times’ underreporting of what historian Niall Ferguson has called “the first and only industrialized genocide,” Leff, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, builds on the groundbreaking work of David S. Wyman (The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust) and Deborah E. Lipstadt (Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust). What distinguishes her effort from theirs is a tight focus on a single newspaper and its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and the prosecutorial zeal with which she goes about building her case that the Times, in journalistic parlance, “missed the story,” big time. The New York Times was hardly alone in its failure to cover reports of Hitler’s death camps with the urgency they deserved. In keeping with mainstream opinion at the time, papers such as the New York Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times either refused to believe early accounts of Jewish genocide in Europe or took the view that reports were exaggerated in order to attract relief funds. What separated the Times from its competitors, as Leff rightly notes, was its superior capacity for foreign reporting (at the outbreak of World War II, the paper had more than 30 correspondents stationed in Europe) and its position as the agenda-setter for other journals, many of which took their editorial cues from the Times’ front page. Leff appears to have read every issue of the Times from 1939 to 1945, and the data she accumulates are damning. From the start of the war in September 1939 through May 1945, when Germany surrendered, the Times published 1,186 stories about what was happening to the Jews in Europe. Only 26 appeared on the front page, and of those only six identified Jews as the primary targets of deportation and destruction. Not once, she writes, did such stories lead the paper, not even when the camps were liberated at the end of the war. Leff cuts the Times and other news organizations some slack (but only some) for approaching reports of Nazi death factories with skepticism. Fake reports of mass slaughter during World War I and the recently ended Spanish Civil War had made journalists cautious about being used as tools of propaganda. She also acknowledges that the journalistic