Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper (review)

On June 1, 1942, the Seattle Daily Times, a mere regional paper in the then relative wilds of the Pacific Northwest where few Jews lived, ran a three-quarter-inch-high headline in all caps across the entire top of the front page. In bold, sans serif type, so prominent it appeared even above the paper's name, the headline announced: "JEWS SLAIN TOTAL 200,000." The United Press wire service story—available to subscriber papers across the country, including the New York Times—called the murder of Polish and Russian Jews "the most terrible racial persecution in modern history," and reminded readers that Hitler had pledged in 1939 that "another world war would result in destruction of the Jews."¹

By contrast, across the continent, on the same, sunny day in New York—the city with the largest Jewish population in the country—the front page of the Times, the greatest Jewish-owned paper in the world, led with news of a thousand-bomber raid on Cologne. Not one of the twelve, page-one stories made any mention of the assembly-line murder, already underway for a year, of Europe's Jews. It is this intentional, policy-driven omission that is the searing subject of Laurel Leff's valuable book on the Times's immoral failure to cover prominently—if even adequately—what we now in historical perspective refer to as the Holocaust.

Leff, who teaches journalism at Northeastern University and who has reported for the Wall Street Journal, documents this failure in excruciating, if at times excessive, detail. Her thesis is two-fold: that news of the Holocaust was buried in minor positions on inside pages, while other, non-Jewish-owned papers often "played" the news more prominently; and that even when they were carried, the news stories minimized that Jews were the specific and indeed usually the only target. In this regard, Leff's research shines in such statistics as that, of the 1,186 stories from September, 1939 to August, 1945 on Europe's Jews, only twenty-six appeared on page one, and of these, only six identified the Jews as the primary victims on the front page before the story was continued inside the paper.

The strength of Leff's book is not merely documenting this failure story by story, which was recognized in Deborah Lipstadt's seminal work, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (1993), to which Leff pays frequent and appropriate homage, and which was reinforced by the Times's own mea culpa of 1996, but to examine what led to it, thus honoring the fifth of the five "W's" of news coverage: Why? Leff has done ground-breaking research to present reporters' own pro-German biases; their personal self-consciousness about highlighting Jews; editors' indifference, if not hostility; their placing inexperienced reporters in key positions in Europe; and an over-reliance on having the government's imprimatur of veracity before reporting news of aktions and of the death camps.

But driving all of this was the unease if not paranoia of the Times's publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, at having the Times identified as a Jewish paper, "The Jew York Times", as antisemites called it. Leff makes great use of Sulzberger's letters and personal papers to show that, while he did rescue some relatives from prewar Germany, Sulzberger's largesse did not extend to the news columns of his family's paper. Sulzberger consistently held, contrary to the Nazis, that Jews were only a religious group, and not a people distinguishable from any other. In a line notable both for its insight, and also for its grace amid much awkward prose, Leff writes, "If Judaism was his faith, however, assimilation was Sulzberger's religion" (26). To this end, he was a devout anti-Zionist (Leff details to excess Sulzberger's battles with the Zionists), opposed the Bergson group...