Russia’s unilateral war against Ukraine is being waged by Vladimir Putin, a Russian dictator, who most people regard as a vile force. New York Times. The problem is that Times hasn’t always aligned against history’s dictators and strongmen.
Although one of these is the Times’ most common charges against former President Donald Trump was his alleged soft spot for authoritarian leaders like Putin, the Times historically has shown a similar soft spot for dictators, as richly documented in Ashley Rindsberg’s book The Gray Lady Winked(published by Midnight Oil, his imprint).
Winked focused on the paper’s misguided, sometimes malign coverage of historical events, wars and the rise of dictatorial leaders, from Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in Russia to Vietnam and the Iraq War, under the auspices of the Ochs-Sulzberger family who have run the paper since 1896.
It’s a deep dive into the fascinating, often appalling history of the paper’s coverage of historical tragedies like the rise of Nazism in Germany and Soviet Communism.
Frederick Birchall reported that Jewish repression was downplayed and there were no racist attacks at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Besides headlines like “Greatest Athletic Show in History,” some woefully bad predictions about Nazi Germany were made by the paper in the run-up to the Olympics, including that it would be the “last chance for racial intolerance” in Germany.
Besides the book’s own powerful content,Get WinkedThe reader received valuable advice that helped him find amazing pieces from the past. This is a terrible prediction from March 1933.
Frederick T. Birchall (chief European correspondent, THE NEW YORK TIMES), addressed a country-wide audience of radio listeners in an address rebroadcast yesterday, from Berlin. Adolf Hitler, his Brown-Shirted Nazis and their ascendency to power were not a cause of alarm.
Yikes.
Rindsberg wrote “The New York Times’s post-Olympics reporting was in lockstep with Nazi propaganda efforts, even if the paper’s motives were not the same as the Reich’s.”
Guido Enderis, Berlin bureau chief, also carefully treated Hitler and Nazism. William Shirer was a rival journalist. The Rise and Fall the Third Reich, described Enderis as “minding the Nazis less than most.”
Walter Duranty penned this gross metaphor about the appalling deaths resulting from Soviet collectivization, writing in a dispatch from Moscow in 1933, “But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Journalistic superstar” Duranty purposely missed the man-made Ukrainian famine engineered by the Soviet Union, known as the Holodomor, which cost at least 4 million lives. Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize, which the paper refuses to acknowledge for its bloody reporting.
The Times Herbert Matthews was a famous man who met Fidel Castro, a rebel in Havana in 1957. Matthews welcomed Castro’s January 1959 revolution under the headline “Cuba: First Step to a New Era.” In purple prose, Matthews claimed Castro encapsulated the will of the Cuban people and even claimed his program “amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anti-Communist.” Again, yikes.
The most appalled of the events was the author Times’ treatment of The Holocaust. The Holocaust was not ruled by a Jewish family. Times, the paper felt no obligation to cover what the paper itself called the “greatest mass slaughter in history” — in a story buried on page five.
Rindsberg argued that the paper’s publishing family purposely kept Holocaust coverage muted because they were Jewish themselves, and that publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger didn’t feel he could risk having his paper appear a “Jewish newspaper.” A story about the liberation of Auschwitz lacked the word “Jew.”
Coming up in Part Two of our review: More gross anti-Israel bias and the emergence of the paper’s internal “woke” brigade.
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