New York Times Buried Holocaust News

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The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: New York Times Buried Holocaust News, Book Reveals

3/14/2005 8:41:00 AM


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To: National Desk

Contact: Rafael Medoff of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, 215-635-5622 or [e-mail]

PHILADELPHIA, March 14 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The New York Times consistently buried news of the Nazi Holocaust in its back pages and downplayed the Jewish identity of the victims, according to the first scholarly study of how the Times covered the Nazi genocide.

Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, by Prof. Laurel Leff, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Prof. Leff, a former reporter and editor who teaches journalism at Northeastern University, is a leading member of the Academic Council of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. The Wyman Institute is organizing Prof. Leff's speaking appearances around the country.

Among the book's key findings:

... New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, an assimilated Jew of German descent, feared that the newspaper would be engaging in special pleading and thus deliberately downplayed news of the Holocaust and the Jewish identity of the victims.

... Holocaust news was consistently relegated to the Times' back pages. Of the 1,186 articles that the Times published during 1939-1945 about Europe's Jews, only 26 (about two percent) of them appeared on the front page, and even those articles "obscured the fact that most of the victims were Jews."

... The Times rarely published editorials about the annihilation of Europe's Jews, and only once ran a lead editorial about the Nazi genocide.

... Because of its importance, the Times helped set the tone for the rest of the media's coverage of Holocaust news; the Times "might have been able to help bring the facts about the extermination of the Jews to public consciousness ... (instead,) the Times helped drown out the last cry from the abyss."

... When the Nazi death camps were liberated, the Times' coverage downplayed the fact that the victims and survivors were overwhelmingly Jews.

Buried by The Times has been strongly praised by leading public figures. Stuart Eizenstat, formerly the U.S. ambassador for Holocaust-era issues, called the book "engrossing and important," and added: "One can only wonder in great sorrow how many lives might have been saved if the nation's and the world's conscience had been touched by full and complete coverage by the Times of what remains the greatest crime of world history."

Marvin Kalb, elder statesman of American journalism, said Buried by The Times "stands tall in scholarship, style and importance ... it is an exceptional study of one of the darkest failures of the New York Times..." Prof. David S. Wyman, author of The Abandonment of the Jews, praised Buried by the Times as "the best book yet about American media coverage of the Holocaust, and an extremely important contribution to our understanding of America's response to the mass murder of the Jews."

(To interview Prof. Leff or to arrange a lecture, please call the Wyman Institute at 215-635-5622.)

ABOUT THE WYMAN INSTITUTE: The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, located on the campus of Gratz College (near Philadelphia), is a research and education institute focusing on America's response to the Holocaust. It is named in honor of the eminent historian and author of the 1984 best-seller The Abandonment of the Jews, the most important and influential book concerning the U.S. response to the Nazi genocide.

The Institute's Advisory Committee includes Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel, Members of Congress, and other luminaries.

The Institute's Academic Council includes more than 50 leading professors of the Holocaust, American history, and Jewish history.

The Institute's Arts & Letters Council, chaired by Cynthia Ozick, includes prominent artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers.

(A complete list is available upon request.)

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