Reviewing *Print to Fit:The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896-2016* - by Ricki Hollander

To be sure, during the New York Times’ long history, there have been accurate and impartial articles about Israel, and even occasional praise in editorial commentary. But the dominant mindset at the newspaper is one of enduring unease with Jewish nationalism and a Jewish state under the guise of espousing progressive and liberal values. It is conveyed through emphasis on the views of Israel’s critics who are presented neutrally and dismissal of the views of its supporters who are presented as partisan and extreme. It is expressed by focusing on Jewish military actions while downplaying Palestinian terrorism and violence, and by treating Palestinians and their leaders as victims alone, without agency and without responsibility for the ongoing conflict.

Ricki Hollander..
CAMERA.org..
10 December '19..

As a longtime media critic who closely follows the New York Times’ coverage of Israel and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I read Jerold Auerbach’s latest book, “Print to Fit: The New York Times, Zionism and Israel, 1896-2016,” with great interest. Having spent almost two decades analyzing New York Times’ reporting about the Jewish state, I’m well-acquainted with the newspaper’s anti-Israel bias, which is an entrenched feature of its coverage.

The newspaper’s negative treatment of Jewish causes has a history that has been discussed before: In her 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper, Northeastern University journalism professor Laurel Leff described the Times’ shameful habit of burying news about the Holocaust at the back of the newspaper. Leff suggested that editors deliberately downplayed news about Nazi targeting and genocide of European Jews as part of a conscious effort by publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger to ensure the newspaper would not appear “too Jewish.” Former New York Times Executive Editor Max Frankel similarly lamented “the staggering, staining failure of The New York Times to depict Hitler’s methodical extermination of the Jews of Europe as a horror beyond all other horrors in World War II” as Sulzberger “went to great lengths to avoid having The Times branded a ‘Jewish newspaper.’”

Print to Fit goes back even further, starting decades before the Holocaust. Auerbach’s contribution is to demonstrate through meticulous documentation just how much a part of its DNA is the New York Times’ animus against the Jewish state. The author, a professor emeritus of history at Wellesley College, brings his historian’s eye to dissecting the newspaper’s long course of bias against the Jewish state, tracing it back to the purchase of the newspaper in 1896 by Adolph S. Ochs.

(Continue to Full Article)