Lorraine Adams on The Truth Behind the Headlines

Your first choice is about The New York Times.

Yes. This is a study that Lauren Leff did, looking at The New York Times and how it handled its coverage of the Holocaust, and what she found is that, by and large, the newspaper did write about it but more often than not they placed the articles inside rather than on the front page and when the piece could have been longer it was shorter, and when it could have been authoritative it was less clear. She shows also that Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was the publisher then, was himself Jewish but was an anti-Zionist, and had reasons for not wanting to come out for the Jewish cause. 

What kind of reasons? 

Sulzberger was reluctant to position the paper as supportive of Jews during a time of fairly entrenched anti-Semitism in the US. He valued assimilation, he chose to see his own Judaism as a religious belief and not a cultural identity. The other thing The Times did was to stress that the persecution and slaughter applied to many other groups, missing the slaughter of six to seven million Jews in its attempt to universalise the Holocaust. 

Why?

I think news organisations are part of a difficult to grasp paradox: They rarely know how to deal with anything completely new. They’re best equipped to promulgate conventional wisdom. In The New York Times review of this book, Robert Leiter says that while concentration camps were nothing new, death camps were new. And it was ‘beyond the scope of rational thought’ to believe Germany had invented them on the scale they had. In other words, evidence schmevidence. What’s likely? That’s the question the reporter and his editor and his publisher are most amenable to asking. And if it’s not likely that something is happening, then the evidence, no matter how often it comes into the newsroom, will be treated with scepticism. Yet in the build-up to Iraq, because highly placed officials were granted more credence than dissenting lower-placed officials, there wasn’t enough scepticism. So, clearly, the degree of scepticism isn’t the heart of the problem. 

Do people know about The Times’ role in this? Has there been an outcry?

Leff’s book came out in 2005 and built on the work of historians Deborah Lipstadt, who looked at all the news media who buried the Holocaust, and David Wyman, who started an institute to study the abandonment of Jews during the Nazi era not just in the news but by other institutions. So it’s a significant subject of scholarship, but it’s not a permanent feature of popular discussion about the media’s failings. It’s usually talked about in terms of what the Germans knew. There’s a wonderful speech by one of the Nazi judges in the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremburg, after almost every German in the film has contended they didn’t know about the death camps, and this character Ernst Janning says, ‘Where were we when our neighbours were being dragged out … in the middle of the night to Dachau? Where were we when every village in Germany has a railroad terminal … where cattle cars were filled with children … being carried off to their extermination? Where were we when they cried out in the night to us? Were we deaf? Dumb? Blind? Maybe we didn’t know the details. But if we didn’t know, it was because we didn’t want to know.’ I think his words apply to American reporters, editors and publishers during the Nazi era.

Tell me about Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann.

I can’t tell you how deeply I love this book. Some people get excited by Sex and the City but I get excited by Public Opinion. I could read you chapters on end and say: ‘This is brilliant and true!’ It was written in 1922 and is an insider’s view of how news is made. That is, news is a made thing. News is not facts. News is what is easiest for a reporter to recognise, not necessarily most important for the public to know – a kidnapping, a bombing, a court filing, anything that pokes up from the irregular and massive tissue of reality and events. For example, you could say: ‘Today there is a British Airways strike.’ But underneath that is a morass of barely detectable instances and feelings, a cavalcade of greed and human longing and anger. News is good at recording the overt act everyone can see but it’s less equipped to determine the how and the why of the event. One example Lippman uses is the Russian Revolution. He was fascinated by what he saw in the newspapers and how there was no reporting of the Revolution’s successes, partly because of censorship, propaganda, and the difficulty of the Russian language, but ‘the hardest thing to report is chaos’. I find this so familiar from my own reporting.

Edward Said, Covering Islam.

Edward Said is a despised figure to some of my friends and a hero to other friends. I pick and choose from his work. He’s most famous for Orientalism, a book which argued that colonial era European intellectuals streamlined their thinking and writing to fit various received and derogatory ideas about a place they called the East. There are exceptions to this, notably the Germans, but I’ll leave that be for now. A much smaller book of his is Covering Islam.