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

The man that the Times article reported as being both “sadder” and “wiser” than when he was first imprisoned went on to construct one of humanity’s darkest regimes, ignited a war that killed tens of millions of people, and engineered the world’s first program of mechanized genocide, making him the last person a reader of the Times should think “was

The New York Times was built with a very different standard in mind than the one embraced by the creators of The 1619 Project, who look at truth as a malleable substance, a “construct,”

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

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.

And this is where each of us bears a responsibility that grows more important every day. Just as we have a responsibility to safeguard our environment, our neighborhoods, and our communities, we have a responsibility to safeguard truth and history so they will be shared resources for generations to come, and not the purview of a small subset of

the journalistic errors examined in this book—the misreporting, fabrications, and distortions—were never the product of simple error. Nor were they solely the result of rogue reporters who took their journalistic fates into their own hands. Rather, they were the byproduct of a particular kind of system, a truth-producing machine that though built

the ideology that holds truth is a substance to be molded to purpose is becoming dominant with frightening speed.

In light of how Sulzberger’s newspaper covered the Holocaust, sweeping stories of the deaths of 1,000,000 of his own people under the rug of mundane stories like tests on coal and the deaths of individual Icelanders, the statement is devastatingly hypocritical.