Buried By The Times

Buried by the Times a book by Laurel Leff, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, is an account of the New York Times' coverage of Nazi atrocities against Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. The book makes the argument that the paper's publisher deliberately chose to "bury" such news in the back pages for ideological reasons.

According to the book Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was publisher of the Times from 1935 to 1961, took the position that Jewishness is solely a matter of belief, that it does not and ought not to have any ethnic or national component, no ethnic peoplehood. He opposed the creation of a Jewish state. His political commitments were to the United States and to universalism. He did not want the Times to be or even appear to be too Jewish. According to Leff, Sulzberger went out of his way to ensure the Times would not portray Jews as the particular victims of Nazism, gave very little print to the news of genocide targeting Jews as it emerged from Europe and did not support the rescue of European Jews. In a book review, Peter Novick wrote:

The tone of Leff's account is one of unremitting outrage. When the Times fails to report any Holocaust-related event, she is outraged. If the paper reports on it, she's outraged that the report isn't on the front page. When a Holocaust story is on the front page, she complains that it isn't high enough on the front page. When there is no editorial on some Holocaust-related subject, she is outraged, and if there is an editorial, she's outraged that it isn't the lead editorial. She is regularly outraged when either reportage or commentary, wherever placed, mentions not Jews alone but other victims as well. When one item made clear that a majority of those killed at a certain locale were Jews, she complains that this was noted "only once" in the story. All of this is so over-the-top as to verge on self-parody.

Leff's ongoing work on American responses to the Holocaust continues to draw commentary. Her research paper Rebuffing Refugee Journalists: The Profession's Failure to Help Jews Persecuted by Nazi Germany asserting that journalists, unlike physicians and attorneys, failed to establish committees to help Jewish refugees secure positions that would have made them exempt from immigration limits and allowed them to come to the United States, inspired a campaign to get the Newspaper Association of America to acknowledge its predecessor organization in the 1930s "was wrong to turn its back on Jewish refugee journalists fleeing Hitler". The Newspaper Association of America responded by issuing a statement regretting that its predecessor organization did not give a full public airing to the issue at the time and by holding a special session on the topic at its annual meeting.