This year’s Holocaust commemoration in South Africa – Yom HaShoah – will be held as a national Zoom meeting on 8th April. One of the lesser known facts about that crime against humanity is about how it was reported – or not reported – by one of the leading newspapers of the English-speaking world, The New York Times.
Buried by The Times – The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, a book by Laurel Leff published in 2005, is a tale about one of the most significant failures in newspaper history.
In it Ms Leff, a journalist who later became an academic, tells the story of how that influential newspaper played down Adolf Hitler’s policy of exterminating Jews. She provides both a statistical analysis of the paper’s coverage of the Holocaust, and an explanation of why the Times downplayed the story.
When war broke out, the paper had more than 30 correspondents in Europe. From them and from many others, including Jews in Europe and the US, it was, throughout the war, the recipient of plenty of information about what was happening. It printed numerous news articles from various sources about murders of Jews, but played them down in two ways. One was to write in general about killings, without mentioning Jews as the main victims. Another was to bury the news on inside pages.
According to Ms Leff, during the nearly six years of the Second World War, the paper ran 1 186 stories about what was happening to the Jews of Europe, but only 26 of these were on the front page, and in only 6 of these were Jews identified as the primary victims. By contrast, reprisals against resistance movements and Nazi persecution of Christians made the front page 57 times during the first three years of the war.
Of reporting on the fate of European Jews Ms Leff comments, “The story never received the continuous attention or prominent play that a story about the unprecedented attempt to wipe out an entire people deserved.”