Highlights from ...
"All the News that's Fit to Wrap Fish in"
Early_historyThe main office of The New York Times was attacked during the New York Draft Riots sparked by the beginning of military conscription for the Northern Union Army now instituted in the midst of the Civil War on July 13, 1863. At "Newspaper Row", across from City Hall, Henry Raymond, owner and editor of The New York Times, averted the rioters with "Gatling" (early machine, rapid-firing) guns, one of which he manned himself. The mob now diverted, instead attacked the headquarters of abolitionist publisher Horace Greeley's New York Tribune until forced to flee by the Brooklyn City Police, who had crossed the East River to help the Manhattan authorities.[14]
On November 14, 2001, in The New York Times 150th anniversary issue, former executive editor Max Frankel wrote that before and during World War II, the Times had maintained a consistent policy to minimize reports on the Holocaust in their news pages.[130] Laurel Leff, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, concluded that the newspaper had downplayed the Third Reich targeting of Jews for genocide. Her 2005 book Buried by the Times documents the paper's tendency before, during and after World War II to place deep inside its daily editions the news stories about the ongoing persecution and extermination of Jews, while obscuring in those stories the special impact of the Nazis' crimes on Jews in particular. Leff attributes this dearth in part to the complex personal and political views of the newspaper's Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, concerning Jewishness, antisemitism, and Zionism.[131] During the war, New York Times journalist William L. Laurence was "on the payroll of the War Department".[132][133]
Failure to report famine in Ukraine
The Times has been criticized for the work of reporter Walter Duranty, who served as its Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936. Duranty wrote a series of stories in 1931 on the Soviet Union and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at that time; however, he has been criticized for his denial of widespread famine, most particularly the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s.[134][135][136][137] In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."[138]