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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
THE TIMES AND THE
HOLOCAUST. Media Log reader S.M.M. called my attention to this
fine James Carroll column in yesterday's Globe on the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Carroll writes about the
New York Times' unseemly
reluctance to describe the
Holocaust for exactly what it was: genocide aimed primarily at
Jews.
Carroll says he learned of this
history while conducting a study at the Joan Shorenstein Center on
the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, at Harvard's Kennedy School.
The director of the Shorenstein Center, Alex Jones, is an expert on
the subject: he and Susan Tifft are the authors of The Trust,
the definitive biography of the Times' ruling family, the
Sulzbergers.
The book is well worth reading. But
this excerpt of an interview
with Tifft and Jones, conducted in 1999, gets to the heart of the
matter:
Equally interesting is the
tale "The Trust" tells of the Ochs-Sulzbergers' conflicted dance
around the question of the family's ethnicity. "The Jewishness of
the family and how that has affected the news coverage of the
Times is a very important aspect of our book," says Tifft.
"Adolph [Ochs, who founded
the modern Times in the late 19th century] did
everything he could not to call attention to the idea that this
was a Jewish newspaper," adds Jones, "which meant sometimes
turning a blind eye to terrible situations that involved Jews. He
was afraid [that covering 'Jewish issues'] would attract
the wrath of people who were enemies of The New York Times and
would marginalize the Times' authority by saying they were just a
bunch of Jews defending other Jews. He had it as a cardinal rule
(which did not change until the 1960s) that the senior editor of
The New York Times could not be a Jew."
Rarely observant, often not even
self-identified as Jews, the Ochs-Sulzbergers nevertheless could
not escape the often petty, sometimes catastrophic prejudice
toward their ethnicity. The contradictions involved in trying to
do so reached a crescendo during the Nazi era. "New York Times
publisher Arthur Hayes Sulzberger (son-in-law of Tennessean Adolph
Ochs) had encountered discrimination himself as a Jew," write
Jones and Tifft. "He was very bitterly stung by the fact that he
could not get into a fraternity at Columbia because he was Jewish.
He was turned away at hotels because he was Jewish. But he very
much wanted not to have The New York Times' authority compromised
by being perceived as a Jewish newspaper. And you look back at the
stories in those days, The New York Times did cover the rise of
Hitler, it did cover what was happening in Europe, but when it
came to the Holocaust, it buried the stories. Instead of putting
them on Page One, they'd be on Page 12. They'd be short stories
instead of long stories. The most telling example is when Dachau
was liberated, the word 'Jew' was never mentioned, although the
story itself appeared on the front page."
"This was a mistake, and The New
York Times apologized on the centennial of the family's ownership
explicitly for the way they handled the Holocaust," adds Jones. He
believes that this and other examples of the newspaper's
abdication of principle (suppression of information about the Bay
of Pigs, editorial obtuseness during the Vietnam War) are a result
of the publisher's desire to maintain the Times' influence on the
political establishment.
The notion that the Times
suppressed what it knew about the Bay of Pigs is a myth. In fact, the
evidence shows that the paper published everything its reporters and
editors had been able to confirm, on page one and above the fold. But
that's a story for another day.
ALL KNOWN FACTS. Those of us
who've been waiting for the Globe to weigh in on the Metro
racism/sexism story in a significant way had to set aside some time
this morning. I think it's safe to say that this
effort, by Christopher
Rowland and Charles Sennott, doesn't leave anything out.
Meanwhile, the
Herald today tries
to link the issue to Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond, and New York
Times ombudsman Dan Okrent tells
Rory O'Connnor that he
wishes the Times would cover the story.
posted at 7:48 AM |
2 comments
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2 Comments:
Did anyone happen to notice the HUMONGOUS SIZE of today’s [1-27-04] Boston Herald front page Headline?
METRO "REFORM" A WHITEWASH
http://news.bostonherald.com/frontpage.bg
Sheesh; you would think they were announcing the start of World War III! The Herald must be scared shit*less that this 17 Million dollar deal might actually go through to give it this kind of splash on the front page like that!
James Carroll...wonderful writer... never disappoints...
Him and Jimmy Breslin are my favorites...Print media could use many more of their type...
Steve L
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
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