The New York Times has been involved in many controversies since its foundation in 1851. It is one of the largest newspapers in the United States and the world, and is considered to have worldwide influence and readership. It has been accused of antisemitism, bias, and playing a notable role in influencing the Iraq War due to its misleading coverage of Saddam Hussein.
Russian Revolution, 1917–1920
In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz investigated the coverage of the Russian Revolution by The New York Times from 1917 to 1920. Their findings, published as a supplement of The New Republic, concluded that The New York Times reporting was neither unbiased nor accurate, adding that the newspaper's news stories were not based on facts but "were determined by the hopes of the men who made up the news organizations." Lippmann and Merz alleged that the newspaper referred to events that had not taken place, atrocities that did not exist, and that it reported no fewer than 91 times that the Bolshevik regime was on the verge of collapse. "The news about Russia is an example of what people wanted to see, not what happened," Lippmann and Merz wrote. "The main censor and the main propagandist was the hope and fear in the minds of reporters and editors."
Coverage of the Holodomor
The New York Times was criticized for the work of reporter Walter Duranty, who served as its Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936. Duranty wrote a series of stories in 1931 on the Soviet Union and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at that time; however, he has been criticized for his denial of widespread famine, most particularly the Holodomor, the Ukraine famine in the 1930s.
In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."
Coverage of the Holocaust
The Times has been criticized for its coverage of the Holocaust. According to the 2005 book "Buried by the Times" by Laurel Leff, it buried in the back pages of the paper stories about the genocide of European Jews, and avoided mentions of Jewish victims of persecutions, deportations, and death camps. Between 1939 and 1945, the Times published more than 23,000 front-page stories - a half of which were about World War II - and only 26 were about the Holocaust. In the documentary Reporting on The Times: How the paper of record ignored the Holocaust, past editors of the newspaper stated that there was a conscious decision to bury the paper's Holocaust coverage.
Various motivations have been attributed to the decision to bury and minimize the Holocaust, all of which are linked to the Times publisher at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was Jewish. Some claim that Sulzberger feared the Times would be "viewed as 'a special pleader for the Jews'"—at a time when anti-Semitism was relatively common in the United States—if the Holocaust was given more prominent coverage. Others point to Sulzberger's anti-Zionist views as a stronger motive. A Reform Jew and an enthusiastic supporter of the American Council for Judaism, both of which heavily emphasize anti-Zionism, Sulzberger believed European Jews were partially responsible for their own demise in the Holocaust. Not even a personal visit to a concentration camp was enough to shake this conviction. In a 1946 speech, less than one year after his visit to a concentration camp, Sulzberger stated, "'[i]t is my judgment that thousands dead might now be alive' if 'the Zionists' had put 'less emphasis on statehood.'" In another speech that same year, Sulzberger downplayed the plight of displaced Jews, stating "they were 'but a minor percentage of the total of displaced persons' and therefore should not be receiving so much attention." According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, "[a]ttempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide" and "[g]ross minimization of the number of victims of the Holocaust" are forms of Holocaust denial and distortion.
In September 1996, the Times released a statement admitting to "underplaying the Holocaust while it was taking place" and that "[c]lippings from the paper show that the criticism is valid."