Buried by the Globe

Drake Bennett, who writes for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section, says this today in his article on the pros and cons of private newspaper ownership:

What also worries many journalists is the issue of what happens when a newspaper owner exercises the prerogatives of ownership. William Randolph Hearst famously used his newspaper empire to drum up support for the Spanish-American War. The Sulzbergers were accused, most recently in a 1999 book by the journalists Alex Jones and Susan Tifft, of playing down the Holocaust in the pages of The New York Times out of concern that the paper would seem too Jewish.

Most recently? In fact, Bennett’s research should have quickly revealed that the definitive work on the Sulzbergers and the Holocaust was written by Northeastern journalism professor Laurel Leff and published in 2005. Her book, “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” recently received the American Journalism Historians Association’s 2006 Award for Best Book in Media History. So it’s not exactly obscure.

Here’s what Seth Lipsky wrote about “Buried by the Times” in the Columbia Journalism Review last year:

The importance of Leff’s book is in helping us to understand what happened so that we can be faster on our feet and avoid the same mistakes now that a new war against the Jews is under way and a new generation of newspaper men and women are on the story.

Then again, the Globe never bothered to review Leff’s book.

By the way, the book by Tifft and Jones to which Bennett refers is “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times,” expertly analyzed in this 2003 post by former Globe columnist David Warsh.