1068 This has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it?
You'd be best served by reading the whole article, reading a more extensive review, or doing your own Google search on this. (Or, read the book!) I'll just lift a few key sentences that caught my eye.“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.” Wyman Institute
“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 only rarely published editorials about the annihilation of Europe's Jews, and never 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.”
Just as the tragedy and scale of the horrific events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were not considered a big story, so the good news coming from Iraq and Afghanistan are not newsworthy and the Palestine/Israel conflict seems to lean in favor of the Palestinians. The column inches devoted to prisoner abuse and a fallen dictator's underwear far exceed any news of the seeds of freedom and democracy struggling to take hold and flower.
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2 comments:
first time I visited your site, loved it! I will be back, it was thought provoking and true!!
Norma - Good post, as to the subject matter - It's common knowledge that Hitler's program of genocide was well-known and documented by the Allies before the Wannsee conference where implementation of the "Final Solution" was hammered out. The fact that the media down-played it in this country shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Jewish groups lobbied hard to get permission from the US government to increase quotas for Jewish refugees prior to our involvement as of Dec. 7, 1941, all to no avail. The book "Voyage of the Damned" documents the heartbreaking story of the German-Jewish passengers of the S.S. Saint Louis who were turned away from the US in 1938. All of its Jewish passengers were returned to Europe. Ironically, while they felt they were getting a reprieve by disembarking in Holland and Belgium, most eventually were rounded up and sent to their deaths in Hitler's concentration camps upon the Nazis' eventual invasion and occupation of those countries.
Many Jewish groups pleaded with the Allied giovernments to target death camps in air raids as they felt that would be a more merciful death for the inmates than slow starvation, and abuse. The Allies refused those requests.
Good topic to bring to the forefront. Thanks.
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