"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."
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| Buried by the "newspaper of record" |
"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.