By Magdalena Hernandez

Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, by Laurel Leff (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, England; 2005; 426 pages; $29)

One of the twentieth century's most troubling questions—How did we allow it to happen?—haunts us still. The issue is the Holocaust, in which upward of thirteen million people, including six million European Jews, were systematically slaughtered by Nazi Germany.

No answer, of course, could ever be satisfactory. Yet vigilance against repeating the past is reason enough to ask the question. And cause enough to sift through the events that led to the massive loss of life, as a means of both understanding the historical context and guarding against another genocide.

Toward this end, School of Journalism associate professor Laurel Leff has researched the relatively scant coverage America's newspaper of record, the New York Times, gave the Holocaust as it was taking place. Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper reports her sometimes startling findings.

Why the focus on the Times? Even in the 1930s, Leff says, the paper was preeminent, "unique in the comprehensiveness of its coverage and the extent of its influence among American opinion makers."

This isn't just a look back at the amount and kind of ink allotted to the story. The book attempts to clarify more subterranean matters. Who at the Times made the editorial decisions? Why was information routinely withheld?

In her investigations, Leff, a veteran journalist, takes a fair-minded approach. She points out how difficult it was for Americans to report on the news coming out of Europe in the years before and during World War II. Obtaining information and determining its credibility and importance were formidable tasks. In addition, after having published as fact exaggerated reports of Germany's actions in Belgium during World War I, American newspapers were rightly skeptical about new accounts of German atrocities.

Even so, as Leff details, the paper's omissions seem mind-boggling today. From September 1939 to the end of the war, the Times published only 1,186 stories—an average of seventeen pieces a month—about the Jews' situation in Europe. Front-page articles specifically about the Holocaust totaled a paltry twenty-six. Other U.S. newspapers were printing Holocaust stories the Times didn't cover.

Throughout the war, Leff concludes, the Times "treated the persecution and ultimately the annihilation of the Jews of Europe as a secondary story."

She writes about correspondent George Axelsson, who in 1942 penned a series of stories about conditions in Germany for the Times Sunday magazine. One report functioned as a travelogue, says Leff, a "tour of hotels, restaurants, and shops in Berlin, in which he griped about the scarcity of taxis, movies that 'are not entertaining,' and food that 'is not brilliant.'" None of Axelsson's seven lengthy stories mentioned Germany's Jews. Even more disturbing, Leff notes, Axelsson's dispatches displayed a "tendency to describe the Germans acting out of rational impulses rather than unbridled race hatred."

Then there were the decisions made by the Times night editors, known as the bullpen, who chose which stories would run in the paper, and where. Frequently, Leff writes, they "determined that the Jews' annihilation was not a front-page story."

Sometimes the bullpen's editorial choices seemed counterintuitive. In one edition, Leff says, "the arrest of thousands of Jews in France in the summer of 1942 did not warrant the front page, while the arrest of a member of the archbishop's staff for helping them did." On another day, the murder of 480 Czechs was deemed "big news, worthy of two front-page stories, four editorials, and an item in the week in review section." Yet a report "describing the deaths of nearly 3,000 times as many Jews appeared on page five."

Ultimately, the most troubling notes in Leff's investigation arise from her discussion of the role played by publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger (1891?Äì1968), who took over the Gray Lady's reins in 1935. Sulzberger knew how grim the situation was for European Jews; he even arranged to have a few of his relatives flee Germany.

Despite this knowledge, Sulzberger chose to exclude or downplay reports about the Final Solution, partly, says Leff, because he did not want the public to view the Times as a Jewish newspaper. Laudable principles of journalistic objectivity aside, the publisher knew that steering his vessel in the direction of the mainstream was a savvy business decision. In an era of "genteel anti-Semitism," Leff reminds us, scrupulous avoidance of the appearance of a Jewish viewpoint was a way of not alienating readers.

An assimilationist, Sulzberger believed being Jewish was not an ethnicity, but a religious choice. He also believed he was American first, Jewish second. Sulzberger was a product of his times—an enormously successful man who, though perhaps not a self-hating Jew, remained anxious about how others saw both him and his newspaper.

And he had justifiable cause for concern. There was a widely held fear the war effort might be jeopardized if Americans thought their sons were fighting to save Jews. Even when reporters wrote about atrocities involving victims they knew were chiefly Jewish, they tended to downplay religion, or stress the wide range of groups being affected by Hitler's vicious campaign. Overall, the Times portrayed the Jews as just one of many groups persecuted by the Nazis—not a group singled out for eradication.

Today, the results of these policies read like willful ignorance. "Though the majority of people hounding embassies for visas and boarding rickety boats for uncertain destinations were Jews," Leff writes, "Times editorials maintained that the refugee crisis was not particularly a Jewish problem." Even after the Nazis' anti-Semitism was public knowledge, stories about the Holocaust failed to receive prominence in the pages of the Times.

"The New York Times contributed to the public's ignorance," Leff concludes—a searing allegation against any media outlet, much less the country's leading paper.

Leff has written a compelling, clear-eyed depiction of an American institution that failed in its responsibilities to empower the afflicted, tell the truth, and uphold its readers' right to know. Her thoroughly researched and well-argued assessments make for a discomforting look at a painful chapter in journalism's history.

The book also provides insight into the quotidian realities that continue to affect news coverage today. Editors make rapid-fire decisions, sometimes based on less-than-exalted considerations related to staff availability, personal preferences, or assumptions about what the public will tolerate. In turn, these imperfect choices shape public opinion, even the outlook of government officials.

Read Buried by the Times, and you'll be reminded of the unceasing importance of the fourth estate. You'll also encounter a cautionary tale. What will future generations think when they look back on the way we're currently covering human tragedies, such as the one playing out in Sudan's Darfur region? Especially when they see how much journalistic attention was devoted to Tom Cruise's romantic relationships and Michael Jackson's nose.

When the media cater to what inquiring minds want to know—at the price of what they need to know—the most urgent news of the day doesn't get the attention and action it merits. And, in retrospect, we'll wonder how we allowed that to happen.

Magdalena Hernandez, MBA'02, is a senior editor.

Aesop & the CEO: Powerful Business Insights from Aesop's Ancient Fables, by David C. Noonan; Nelson Books; 2005

Searching for more meaning in management, David C. Noonan, E'75, has turned tales by the Greek fabulist Aesop into a primer on business. The fable of the ant and the grasshopper, for example, stresses the importance of long-term planning. Other topics range from appreciating employees to packaging products. A seasoned consultant, Noonan writes knowledgeably about workplace challenges.