The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

could not survive. Other women gave birth to shapeless deformities. Ninety percent of the children under the age of twelve at the time of the test developed thyroid tumors. In short, the bomb tests ruined the lives of hundreds of people, damning them and their children to shockingly short lifespans and illness.36 And the American public, still unde

Washington Post, considered one of the Times’s main competitors, ran an editorial on the day of the opening ceremonies of the Berlin Olympics. Like William Shirer, the Post took a drastically different stance to the New York Times’s breathless praise of the Games, noting the violence in Germany instead of forgetting it and asking serious questions

whether it was a Nazi collaborator serving as the paper’s Berlin bureau chief at the most sensitive moment in modern history, a communist propagandist helping to midwife American recognition of the Soviet Union, the creation of a jihadist boy-martyr almost out of thin air, the cover-up of radiation sickness resulting from the use of nuclear weapons

station,” the reporter and editors at the Times left out one critical fact that would have been known to them all: the “semi-official news agency” cited as the article’s main source was one of the Nazis’ central propaganda organs. In reality, by 1939 there was no such thing as a “semi-official news agency” in Germany. Propaganda minister Joseph Goe

these major failings, which had an indelible impact on history’s unfolding, to the phenomenon that being great means being alone, which leads us to error since there is no one there to check our mistakes or balance our thinking. And that may be the case. But if there is one overriding aim of this book it is not just to call attention to errors like

was not until after the systematic mass slaughter of Europe’s Jews that the event was given the name “Holocaust,” which means “a complete burning.”

its part, the New York Times seemed equally aware of this debt of gratitude—even if it was less than eager to share this fact. An article that appeared in the Times on April 22, 1959 reported that a meeting had indeed taken place between Castro and Times management. But it left out one important detail: the newly installed ruler of Cuba had “profus

this point, it is impossible to say which of the Times’s reports and hopeful predictions about the Nazis was the most disturbing. What can be said is that already by 1935, a clear pattern had emerged in the New York Times’s reporting on Nazi Germany. While reports from the 1920s might have taken a “split-the-difference” approach to Hitler, by the 1

Castro, whose tour was organized by a major American PR firm, flexed his publicity muscles in the United States, appearing on Meet the Press, laying wreaths at the tombs of Lincoln and Jefferson, and greeting thousands of cheering and screaming supporters every step of the way. The trip was a major success for Castro. For the Cuban people, it was a