Buried by the Times is a 2005 book by Laurel Leff.
The book is a critical account of The New York Timess coverage of Nazi atrocities against Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. It argues that the news was often buried in the back pages in part due to the view about Judaism of the paper's Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. It also gives a critical look at the work of Times correspondents in Europe.
The book received critical acclaim and was the recipient of the best media history book from the American Journalism Historians Association.
Argument
Placement of news articles
The placement of news articles in a newspaper is a good indication of the importance given by the newspaper to a story. The Times consistently placed major stories about the Nazi treatment of European Jews on back pages "by the soap and shoe polish ads". Leff found that during the period September 1939 to May 1945 very few stories about Jewish victims made the Times front page. "The story of the Holocaust—meaning articles that focused on the discrimination, deportation, and destruction of the Jews—made the Times front page just 26 times, and only in six of those stories were Jews identified on the front as the primary victims."
Terminology
Leff points out that the Times often used a more generic term such as refugee or nationality to refer to Nazi victims who were Jewish. In his review, Gal Beckerman writes, "More shocking even than the chronic burying of articles with the word Jew in them is how often that word was rubbed out of articles that specifically dealt with the Jewish condition. It's almost surreal at times. How could you possibly tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without mentioning Jews? But The Times did, describing how 500,000 persons ... were herded into less than 7 percent of Warsaw's buildings, and how 400,000 persons were deported to their deaths at Treblinka. As Leff put it, The Times, when it ran front-page stories, described refugees seeking shelter, Frenchmen facing confiscation, or civilians dying in German camps, without making clear the refugees, Frenchmen, and civilians were mostly Jews."
Role of religion
Sulzberger was a convinced Reform Jew which was the basis of his assimilationist approach: Judaism for him was only a religion and that Jews were neither a race nor a people any more than Presbyterians or Methodists were a race. In December 1942 in a memo to New York Times staff he wrote "I have been trying to instruct the people around here on the subject of the word 'Jews', i.e., that they are neither a race nor a people, etc.," Former New York Times journalist Ari Goldman, in his review of the book, writes: "There can be little doubt that Sulzberger's views about Judaism trickled down to the editors making the decisions about what to put in the newspaper every day."
Staff biases
Leff examines the stances and performances of the Timess reporting and editorial staff. In the field, "She exposes the disturbing Nazi and Vichy attachments of a few European correspondents." While back in New York, Sulzberger's bias was shared by other Jewish staffers: "Between them and influential Catholics among the crucial night editors, who decided where to place news items, the imperiled Jews of Europe had no advocate in the newsroom."
Conclusion
Blame for the lack of coverage: Beside the biases and lack of competence of the European correspondents, Leff "points out the problems with journalistic convention of the time, which preferred reprinting government pronouncements to digging for unknown stories. There was also, of course, a disorganized Jewish community and a Roosevelt administration too preoccupied with the war, both not pushing hard enough for front-page coverage. But the bulk of the blame, in Leff’s telling, falls squarely at the feet of The Timess publisher, Sulzberger."
A number of observers have observed how badly informed the American public was about the Nazis' systematic murder of European Jews. Leff points out that the way The Times covered the Holocaust "contributed to the public's ignorance." But in addition to poorly informing the public, "The Times coverage mattered so much," she writes, "because other bystanders, particularly the American government, American Jewish groups, and the rest of the American press, took cues from the paper. Among major American newspapers, it was unique in the information it received, how it disseminated the news, and to whom."
Reception
The book received critical acclaim.