Did you know that at the end of World War II, and for decades afterward, Americans claimed they did not know about the Holocaust as it was happening? How was it possible for the public to claim such ignorance? The New York Times failed to do its job, that's why.
Scholars claim the reason is that the American media in general, and the New York Times in particular, never treated the Holocaust as an important news story. The American media buried news about the Holocaust. Between 1939 and 1945, The New York Times published more than 24,000 front-page stories. Of those, 11,500 were about World War II. 26 were about the Holocaust.
From the start of the war in Europe to its end nearly six years later, the story of the Holocaust made the New York Times front page only 26 times out of 24,000 front-page stories. Most of those stories referred to the victims as “refugees” or “persecuted minorities" and ONLY SIX TIMES were "Jews" identified on page one as the primary victims.
So why did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's favorite newspaper, the New York Times, bury the bulk of its Holocaust coverage deep inside the paper? What kept American journalists from recognizing the significance of the systematic murder of six million people? The Roosevelt Administration told the media to downplay the news to the American people, that's why.
“It was a bad judgment call. It was something that mattered as much as anything as far as news judgment, and the New York Times blew it," explains a former New York Times reporter.
The result: The New York Times deliberately de-emphasized the Holocaust news, reporting it in isolated, inside stories. The few hundred words about the Nazi genocide the Times published every couple days were hard to find amidst a million other words in the newspaper. Times readers could legitimately have claimed not to have known, or at least not to have understood, what was happening to the Jews.
The New York Times’s judgment that the murder of millions of Jews was a relatively unimportant story also set the tone for other journalists trying to assess the news, among Jewish groups trying to arouse public opinion, and among government leaders trying to decide on an American response.
If you think giving the media free license to censor the news, distort the news or manufacture fake news is benign, you would be terribly, terribly wrong. The media literally has the power to kill.
Now you know why the New York Times buries news on the million Christians that have been slaughtered by ISIS. They don't consider the global Christian genocide a worthwhile news story. Now you know why just yesterday the New York Times buried the fact that a kid was going to blow up a school with a bomb in Utah on behalf of ISIS and buried the news about several radical Islamic terrorists trying to blow up a college and knife dozens of people at Minnesota malls and streets. The New York Times And The Washington Post are not on OUR side. They're on their side. NEVER FORGET.
No comments:
Post a Comment