Reporting on the Times: The New York Times and the Holocaust

Award-winning student filmmaker Emily Harrold's documentary short is based on Laurel Leff's book Buried by the Times, which claims that The New York Times intentionally downplayed coverage of the Holocaust during World War II. Between 1939 and 1945, only 26 articles related to the Holocaust received front-page placement, and the rest were largely buried within the newspaper. Reporting on the Times argues that the Times intentionally employed anodyne language to obscure the severity of the Nazi atrocities being committed because the newspaper's Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, feared that an overt emphasis on Nazi crimes against Europe's Jews would spur an anti-Semitic backlash in the United States. A few ex-Times reporters are interviewed, who tsk-tsk their former employer for being a bad citizen, but no one from the current editorial executive offices appears onscreen to confirm the depiction of Sulzberger as a self-loathing Jew. Also not mentioned is the fact that the Times' post-1941 coverage from Europe was not generated by correspondents in occupied countries, but from reports smuggled out and not easily confirmed. In fairness to the paper, it would not have been responsible to run prominent stories that lacked eyewitness affirmation, and it wasn't until the confiscation of Nazi photographic and motion picture evidence after the liberation that the ghastly truth was revealed. Was the Times any more guilty than others of not doing enough to call attention to the Holocaust while World War II was raging, or is this a sterling example of hindsight-driven revisionist history? Too brief to make a convincing case, this is an optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)