Many journalists today are still unwilling to confront how the American media covered the Holocaust, said Laurel Leff, an associate professor of Journalism at Northeastern University, and author of a book on that topic, during the journalism department's fall lecture last Thursday. In Leff's book, "Buried by the Times," she analyzes the New York Times' coverage of the German murder of six million European Jews from 1939 to 1945, pointing out that only a small fraction of Holocaust-related stories were on the paper's front page.

At the event held in the Schwartz Auditorium, Leff said that while interest in the book had come from mostly Jewish organizations, there was a lack of responses from fellow journalists, her target audience. She explained that the Times covered other major news events much more thoroughly than the Holocaust.

Leff provided many examples of what she saw as the wrongful placement of Times news stories about incidents that were part of the Nazis' plan to annihilate all Jews. She pointed out that while she had counted about 12,000 articles of that sort, only 26 of those had been on the front page.

Leff presented excerpts of Times' stories from 1939 to 1944 and emphasized that the problem wasn't that the paper did not have enough information or confirmed reports. She told her her audience of mostly journalism students "how common and routine these stories were," but to take note of the "detailed information" the articles included even while they appeared on later pages.

One article she quoted appeared Nov. 24, 1942, on page 10, and reported "information received [in Palestine] by which the Germans in Poland are carrying out the slaughter of Jews includes accounts of trainloads of adults and children taken to great crematoriums ... near Cracow."

In Leff's view, the Jewish faith of the New York Times' owners, the Sulzberger family, led by publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, exacerbated the situation. She explained that in addition to feeling personally estranged from the Zionist movement, Sulzberger was afraid of appearing biased towards the Jewish cause.

"The publisher so much didn't want to act like a Jew, he didn't act like a journalist," she said.

Leff gave a mixed review of the media's coverage of similar crises today. She praised Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for the "compelling way" in which he called attention to the crisis in Darfur. During the years of World War II, "nobody at the Times was writing those kinds of columns," she said.

She added, however, that she thought the complexities of international crises could also discourage journalists. "It's hard to figure out what to do in Darfur," she said. "It's a lot easier not to try and take on another burden."

Jamie Pottern '09, said she was "impressed with how much research [Leff] had done to really gather all the evidence that was out there." Leff, she said, was knowledgeable in answering students' questions.

"I had a very visceral reaction during the presentation because I was just very overwhelmed by the extent to which the New York Times had really entirely buried the story of six million people being exterminated," she said.