Bring Down the Duck! Kalb Says WSJ 'Mean-Spirited' to Criticize NY Times Over Leaks

That didn't take long! Just yesterday I suggested readers keep in mind the MSM's bashing of Pres. Bush on his birthday the next time a liberal accused conservatives of being 'mean-spirited.' Groucho fans will know what I mean when I say: bring down the duck! On last evening's Journal Editorial Report , liberal newsie Marvin Kalb said the magic 'm-s' word in condemning the Wall Street Journal for its criticism of the New York Times.

The Journal had run an editorial, Fit and Unfit to Print [subscription required] that both explained why it had run a story on the anti-terror financial tracking program, and criticized the New York Times for doing so. For the record, the editorial explained that in contrast with the Times article, the Journal only published declassified information that had been provided them by the Treasury Department.

"I think the editorial you ran was dead wrong. I think you declared war on another American newspaper without cause. It is mean-spirited."

For the record, here's an excerpt from the Journal editorial. You be the judge as to how mean-spirited - or right on target - it was:

"How important are the national security concerns? And how do those concerns balance against the public's right to know?

"The problem with the Times is that millions of Americans no longer believe that its editors would make those calculations in anything close to good faith. We certainly don't. On issue after issue, it has become clear that the Times believes the U.S. is not really at war, and in any case the Bush Administration lacks the legitimacy to wage it.

"So, for example, it promulgates a double standard on 'leaks,' deploring them in the case of Valerie Plame and demanding a special counsel when the leaker was presumably someone in the White House and the journalist a conservative columnist. But then it hails as heroic and public-spirited the leak to the Times itself that revealed the National Security Agency's al Qaeda wiretaps."

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Interestingly, Marvin Kalb also said this of the Times:

Our subject makes pygmies of us all. Our location evokes memories so raw and profound that I end up thinking: "there but for the grace of God go I."

... In July, Gerhard Riegner, a representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland, reported to London and Washington for the first time that Hitler had in fact ordered the extermination of European Jewry. "Received alarming report," he wrote, "that in Fuhrer's headquarters plan discussed and under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled [by] Germany, numbering 3 1/2-to 4 million, should, after deportation and concentration in [the] East, be exterminated at one blow to resolve once [and] for all the Jewish question in Europe." In London, the Foreign Office said that any official British response "might annoy the Germans" and besides, officials added, they had no confirmation. In Washington, the State Department was suspicious of what scholar Walter Laqueur described as the "unsubstantiated nature of the information."

In October, 1942, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published the whole Riegner cable without attribution. A month later, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles confirmed to Rabbi Stephen Wise that the cable was accurate in every depressing detail. Worse, he said, two of the four million Jews had already been killed. The United States then pushed for an Allied condemnation of the Nazi program of extermination which was announced in mid-December 1942.

At this point there could be no doubt about the authenticity of the reports of Nazi atrocities against the Jews. And yet, amazingly, the coverage was marginalized. It lacked the explosive force that would carry it from the inside pages to the front pages, from a duckable option to unavoidable action. How come?

Elie Wiesel, in a recent conversation, explained by drawing a distinction between "information" and "knowledge." On its own information meant only the existence of data. It lacked an ethical component. It was neutral. Knowledge, implied Wiesel, was a higher form of information. Knowledge was information that had been internalized, crowned with a moral dimension that could be transformed into a call for action....

My final reason, after "unconditional surrender," after antisemitism, after the unbelievability of the Holocaust, after the strange silence of American journalism, focused on the culture and personalities of the people who ran The New York Times, which also failed in its journalistic responsibility during the war. Not that it didn't cover the war -- it did, with an exceptional and costly burst of energy and professionalism; it simply did not cover the Holocaust; and to this day the people who run (or have run) this great newspaper are baffled and embarrassed by this extraordinary omission. The logo of The New York Times read and reads "All The News That's Fit To Print," but during the war The Times, which was and is so special to American journalism, knew much more than it printed about the Holocaust; and what it did print, it printed, as a rule, inside, cut, often trivialized. What was the reason?

Here things get very complicated. Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher during the war. According to family history, his ancestors came to America in 1695. Two were among the Jewish notables of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, when General-turned-President Washington visited their synagogue. Not surprisingly, Sulzberger considered himself to be a member of the establishment, an American, who just happened to be Jewish. During a trip to Palestine in 1937, he confronted the reality of zionism, and it profoundly discomfited him. "Never have I felt so much a foreigner as in this Holy Land," he later wrote.

On his return to New York, he found that his old fears of divided loyalty led him, to quote journalist Peter Grose, "to minimize, if not ultimately deny, his Jewish identity." Sulzberger helped found the anti-zionist American Council for Judaism, which Isaiah Berlin called "an assembly of mice who say that they will bell the zionist cat." Interestingly, The Times gave this splinter group as much coverage as it gave to all the other Jewish groups combined -- and much, much more than it gave to the Holocaust.

Sulzberger, as high brow among American Jews as Bernard Baruch or Walter Lippmann, was an ultra-assimilationist, a civilized man who simply wanted to avoid being categorized as a Jew. Baruch, denounced by the Jew-baiting Detroit radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, as "the uncrowned King of Wall Street," fled from too close an association with Jews. Lippmann, one of the great figures in American journalism in this century, frequently criticized Jews as "rich, vulgar and pretentious." He suggested that Harvard limit the enrollment of Jews. He dismissed Hitler's antisemitism as "unimportant," adding that the German leader was "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people." From 1933, when Hitler came to power, until 1945, when Hitler was destroyed, Lippmann never wrote a word about the Holocaust, never once mentioned the death camps.

In The Times, the murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor-league stuff, kept at a proper distance from the authentic news of the time. For example, on July 2, 1944, The Times published what it called "authoritative information" to the effect that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths, and another 350,000 were earmarked for similar action. This news was published as four inches of copy on page 12. The Times was making a statement with editorial judgments of this sort, and other editors, other reporters, other news organizations, all took their cues from The Times. Everyone knew that its foreign coverage set the standard. A perception then spread that if the Jewish-owned Times covered the Holocaust in this skimpy manner, then so could they, with impunity. The Times's foreign editor during the war was Ted Bernstein, described by a colleague as "a brilliant Jew running away from his roots."

Was it then any surprise that Jewish news, other than the Holocaust, was also shortchanged in The Times; that bylines, such as A.H. Raskin and A.M. Rosenthal appeared, rather than Abraham Raskin and Abraham Rosenthal? Cyrus Sulzberger, a columnist covering the war, used his clout as a member of the family to discourage the hiring of too many Jewish reporters. Daniel Schorr said that he was told in the early 1950s that he would not be hired by The Times, because there were already too many Jews on the paper.

Of course the times and The Times have changed, and the journalism of the 1990s -- the journalism after Vietnam, after Watergate, after the technological revolutions which produced CNN, faxes, computers and the O.J. trial -- is significantly different from the journalism of the 1940s. We cannot impose the journalistic yardsticks of the 1990s on the 1940s. Nor can we fairly expect the journalists of the 1940s to perform as though they lived and worked in the 1990s. Now journalists are obsessed with sex and scandal, fires and sports, weather and murders, tilting towards sensationalism whenever the competitive opportunity beckons. Negative and cynical, they distrust the government and disparage politicians. Back then, journalists operated in a narrower environment, with simpler rules. They marched to the government's beat; they hated Hitler and Tojo; they supported the boys at the front. And, their technological opportunities were comparatively primitive.

It should be clear that the Holocaust was unique, the reporting of the Holocaust was unique, and neither can be duplicated. So long as there is a strong Israel and an articulate, influential Jewish community in the United States, I feel confident in saying that another Holocaust -- another foreign, state-run program of extermination of the Jews -- would be impossible. But other mass killings? These are not only possible but likely.

Given the unprecedented gobbling up of substantial media enterprises by even bigger media conglomerates, it should not be surprising these days that there is not even a commonly accepted definition of "news." Yet, if a story broke about another Holocaust, there could be no doubt not now that it would be front-page news. Such horrible secrets could no longer be kept for months and years. Responsible officials are constantly reminded that what was tolerated during the Holocaust is unacceptable behavior today. For example, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, during a recent visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, read with dismay John McCloy's 50-year-old negative response to a demand by the World Jewish Congress that the Allies bomb the rail lines leading into Auschwitz. The response and the demand were on a wall here flanking a huge blow-up of the death camps. "Remember, Strobe," said his companion, the Museum's Director Walter Reich, "any letter you write may end up on a museum wall."

The Journalism of The Holocaust
by Marvin Kalb
delivered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
February 27, 1996

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