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

On August 31, 1939, Hitler put into action one of the most flagrant scams in the history of the modern world. In order to give Germany a reason and a right to begin its war of European conquest, he and a number of Gestapo propagandists and henchmen (including Heinrich Müller, who would be made head of the Gestapo a month later) concocted a scheme t

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

these words and acknowledged that the Nazis, who had provoked a world war and were ravaging Europe, had committed one of the greatest crimes in history. It also put its finger on the variety of devices used to kill the Jews, from new technologies like gas chambers to the simplest methods of brutality such as starvation and whipping. Yet the story r

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The New York Times was not scrutinized the way any institution that serves a critical public function ought to be. No one was watching the watchdog.

fit the facts to a preconceived pattern.

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

There was only one question confronting Nazi leaders: How would the international media portray the games—as the Nazi commandeering of an international tradition, as it was, or as a celebration of a rebuilt, beaming Germany, as Hitler wanted?

There is no doubt that the Times is well within its rights in doing so. It is a private company, not an official institution, and it can make whatever decisions serve its audience, who are its customers. The problem is that this approach to history leads us down a dangerous path, one from which it can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to return.

And, accordingly, never once has the New York Times officially apologized for the way that it covered—or did not cover—the Holocaust.