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Even those who've developed an immunity to Timesspeak had to be shocked by the recent article in The New York Times alleging Israeli abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
The article slid from sly slurnalism to the big lie.
(That's a lie so outrageous that it becomes believable because it must be true, otherwise nobody could say such a thing.) If you don't know what article I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky.
Neil Postman, who headed the department of "Media Ecology" at NYU, gave his students rules to live by to preserve their sanity. One was, "Do not watch TV news shows or read any tabloid newspapers." They're too jarring.
But it's important to have some historical perspective. So, let me tell you about three little-known stories from the Holocaust. All three were kept secret. The first indirectly involves The New York Times.
You're probably too young to remember Nipper. He was the dog on RCA Victor record labels, staring into the speaker of a crank-up phonograph, listening to "his master's voice."
In 1986, Nipper got a new master. RCA Records was sold to a German media behemoth, the Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG).
That same year, Bertelsmann acquired American book publisher Doubleday; a year later, it created the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. Next, in 1998, it acquired Random House, which was launched in 1927 with the mission to publish "a few books, on the side, at random."
By 2020, Bertelsmann took 100% control of Penguin Random House, making it sole owner of the world's largest publishing group.
OK, I'm not in the habit of business bashing. Business today is more global than national.
(Still, it rankles me that Tnuva, the largest manufacturer of dairy products in Israel, became Chinese food. In 2014, the state-owned Bright Food Group of China bought 56% of Tnuva, over the protests of many of the farms that supply the milk. It's enough to curdle your milk and honey.)
If you'll forgive me for repeating myself, you may remember what I told a car rental agency in Israel when they offered me a free upgrade from a Hyundai to an Opel: "I don't want a German car. It smells from gas."
But this is more than garden variety Germanphobia. Bertelsmann spent 50 years hiding its active collaboration with Nazi Germany and claiming to be a victim. But facts began to surface, especially its support of the Schutzstaffel — the special police force known as the SS, notorious for their inhumanity.
In 2000, the wire-service, Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), reported, "Historians hired by Bertelsmann have revealed that the firm, which had painted itself as an opponent of the Nazis, was actually the largest producer of books and propaganda for the German army during World War II. The material was produced under the supervision of Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels."
In 2002, The New York Times wrote, "The report documents how far [Bertelsmann head] Heinrich Mohn was willing to go to accommodate the Nazi party as it rose to power in the 1930s. Though not a party member, Mr. Mohn joined an SS patrons' circle, whose members supported the SS mainly through monthly donations."
The report also found that the company profited from Jewish slave labor while producing pro-Nazi propaganda tracts.
The JTA wrote, "According to the historical commission, the firm, already known in the 1920s as … [an] often antisemitic publisher, produced more than 20 million books and other materials for German soldiers during the war. Of the 130 publishing companies that profited from doing business with the Nazi regime, Bertels mann ranked No. 1, ahead even of the official publisher of the Nazi Party, the Eher-Verlag, the commission found."
Contrary to Bertelsmann's claims that it was shut down in 1944 because of anti-Nazi activities, the commission revealed that the actual cause was that German officials suspected the company of hoarding stockpiles of paper, which was under rationing.
Concerns about the Bertelsmann takeover of American media megacompanies is not just random. It's Bertelsmann über alles.
But there's a journalistic twist in this convoluted story. I find it ironic that The New York Times published an expose of Bertelsmann's guilt-edged record on the Holocaust.
In Laurel Leff's 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, she wrote, "The Times never treated the news of the Holocaust as important — or at least as important as, say, informing motorists to visit the Office of Price Administration if they did not have their automobile registration number and state written on their gasoline ration coupons."
The Times, in a review of the book, could not deny the obvious: "Leff catalogs in grim, ever-mounting detail how little attention the Holocaust received in The Times and how, when it was covered, the stories were generally buried in back pages. … The publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, comes in for considerable and often justifiable criticism. Like many other Jews of the period, he had a troubled relationship with his Jewishness and was outspoken in his opposition to Zionism. All this led him to make unfortunate journalistic decisions as he strove to ensure that the paper was not perceived as favoring any one group, the Jews especially."
Then, in a "dog-ate-my-homework" defense, the reviewer faults Leff for "what a trained historian would have brought to this complex and demanding material: a sense of context. Her argument is constructed through hindsight, which tends to skew her conclusions."
There was a notable exception to The Times' policy of brushing off Holocaust items.
For the right price, in 1943, they ignored their own policy and ran an ad written by Ben Hecht after the Romanian government offered to release 70,000 Jewish prisoners if their passage was paid.
The ad read: "For Sale to Humanity 70,000 Jews Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 a Piece".
Hecht, a cynical newspaperman and playwright, was far removed from anything Jewish. Then Irgun activist Peter Bergson (aka Hillel Kook) came to America and lit a fire under him. The result? As Hecht wrote in his autobiography, A Child of the Century, "I turned into a Jew in 1939. I had before then been only related to Jews. In that year I became a Jew and looked on the world with Jewish eyes. The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, had brought my Jewishness to the surface."
As Menachem Begin put it, "Ben Hecht wielded his pen like a drawn sword."
And he stuck it to The New York Times.
Next, rethinking IBM.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.
Previously:
• Are Jews really hardwired to be miserable?
• The Time Machine
• One big happy dysfunctional family
• Why Pay Less If You Can Pay More?
• Are We Having Font Yet?
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
• There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew
• Asking For It