Last week, new information continued to come out about how the New York Times distorted the events of the Gaza war to portray the IDF as killers of children. Although the newspaper’s record of hostility toward Zionism predates even the founding of the Jewish state, such distortions are also the result of the Faustian bargain reporters make with Hamas, which allows journalists to operate in its territory so long as they only report what the regime allows them too. This, too, is a familiar story, writes Laurel Leff—examining the tale of the Times’s Nazi-sympathizing Berlin bureau chief Guido Enderis:
All American newspapers found reporting in Nazi Germany difficult. The government tightly controlled information and harangued and threatened reporters who managed to publish what it didn’t like. The Nazi regime also didn’t hesitate to use its strongest weapons—banning a newspaper from distribution in Germany, kicking a reporter out of the country, or denying a reporter’s reentry. As a putatively “Jewish-owned” newspaper, the New York Times considered itself a special target. . . . Enderis’s job therefore was “administering reasonably soothing syrup” to Nazi officials, as another Times reporter put it.
Yet, Enderis’s actions weren’t purely strategic and their consequences were grave. Throughout the 1930s, Enderis helped steer Times coverage to play down Jewish persecution and play up Germany’s peaceful intentions. He kowtowed to Nazi officials, wrote stories presenting solely the Nazi point of view, and reined in Times reporters whose criticism he thought went too far, shaping the news in favor of a genocidal regime bent on establishing a “Thousand Year Reich.”
To be clear, the Times had no agenda to bolster Nazism. In fact, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the Times publisher during most of the Nazi era, detested Hitler and advocated U.S. intervention to stop German aggression. Nor was Enderis a Nazi collaborator.
Instead, what crippled the Times coverage of Hitler and the Nazis was a timidity and deference to authority born of being an institution controlled by Jews who desperately wanted to fit into WASP society. Rather than run the slightest risk of being tossed out of Nazi Germany and causing a ruckus over its Jewish ownership, the Times let a figure like Enderis—a pitiful ally of some of history’s greatest villains—lead its Berlin bureau during its most consequential decade.
More about: Nazi Germany, New York Times