An honourable, salutary warning to journalism

August 1945, Nagasaki - "Observers in the tail of our ship saw a giant ball of fire rise as though from the bowels of the earth, belching forth enormous white smoke rings. Next they saw a giant pillar of purple fire . ... . ... The mushroom top was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, sizzling upward and then descending earthward, a thousand Old Faithful geysers rolled into one.

"It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down. In a few seconds it had freed itself from its gigantic stem and floated upward with tremendous speed, its momentum carrying into the stratosphere to a height of about 60,000 ft."

A classic "first draft of history" from William Laurence, a science writer for the New York Times, on a plane following the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb.

The Times last week reprinted the extract and a number of others from its correspondents from Gettysburg to the trenches of Flanders in a celebration issue to mark its 150th anniversary. Among the most painful is Samuel Wilkenson's description of the battlefield at Gettysburg in 1863 where he discovered his eldest son's body.

"My pen is heavy," he wrote. "Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburg have baptised with your blood the second birth of Freedom in America, how you are to be envied! I rise from a grave whose wet clay I have passionately kissed, and I look up and see Christ spanning this battle-field with his feet and reaching fraternal and lovingly up to Heaven. His right hand opens the gates of Paradise - with His left He beckons to these mutilated, bloody, swollen forms."

The 150th celebration was supposed to have happened on September 20th but was postponed by the attack on the World Trade Centre, in some ways fortuitously. September 11th, as columnist Frank Rich observes, reminded us all how important papers like the Times really are and its exhaustive reporting of the aftermath gave it the opportunity to demonstrate again why many regard it as the world's greatest newspaper.

The Times is the centrepiece of a $3.5 billion conglomerate of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations and internet sites and has a news-gathering operation employing 1,000 journalists in New York and in dozens of domestic and foreign bureaus. Nearly 1.1 million copies - 1.7 million on Sundays - are sold every day.

The paper, whose motto for over 100 years has been "All the news that's fit to print" and has some 81 Pulitzers to its name, takes itself very seriously, sometimes too seriously, as editor Howell Raines admits, but has managed in the face of colossal pressure to resist the trivialisation and loss of journalistic values. As Rich points out, foreign affairs, which accounted for 45 per cent of television network newscasts in the 1970s, was down to 13.5 per cent by 1995, according to a Harvard study. "Other surveys show that newspapers had cut foreign news by four-fifths over the same period," he records, quoting the head of the Public Broadcasting Service as claiming there were three times as many stories about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire last year as there were about Osama bin Laden.

Yet if the Times can still hold its head up now, it does so while acknowledging its greatest shame. Max Frankel, a former executive editor, writes in the supplement of what he calls the greatest journalistic failure of the century, the Times wartime reporting of what became known as the Holocaust.

The story is deeply disturbing, even at this remove. Because the Times knew what was going on. Indeed, it published reports of mass exterminations within months of Hitler's secret decision in 1941 to implement "the final solution". But, as Frankel points out, it "drowned its reports about the fate of Jews in the flood of wartime news", consciously refusing to single out the treatment of Jews as noteworthy or unique, repeatedly playing down stories.

Only six times in six years did the plight of the Jews make the front page, only once was it the subject of an editorial, only twice the subject of impassioned appeals in the magazine.

The Times was not alone, by any means, in the mainstream press, and there was no one reason for the omission. But the mistaken perception held by many today, that the Allies did not know really what was happening to the Jews was not to blame.

In large part it was the sensitivity of the paper itself, and particularly its all-powerful publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, to the regularly invoked claim that the Times was part of the "Jewish media" and a determination not to be so labelled by appearing to make a special pleading on behalf of Jews.

Sulzberger also held passionately that Jews were simply members of a religion and not a people deserving of a homeland. Steering the paper away from championing the cause of a Jewish Palestine meant not giving the Zionist lobby political ammunition.

Yet the evidence was there. On March 1st, 1942, an article on page 28 bore the headline: "Extinction feared by Jews in Poland", quoting Polish underground sources claiming that 3.5 million Jews stood condemned "to cruel death - to complete annihilation". By the end of June, two paragraphs appended to the end of a related article brought the news that "probably the greatest mass slaughter in history" had already claimed the lives of 700,000 Jews in Poland - a slaughter employing "machinegun bullets, hand grenades, gas chambers, concentration camps, whipping, torture instruments and starvation". On June 30th, a brief item said the World Jewish Congress put the death toll at one million.

Still more detail would follow - all of it buried. Editorial values played second fiddle to a combination of the paper's, or, more precisely, its publisher's, perceived commercial and political interests. Frankel's mea culpa is an honourable, salutary warning to journalism.

Today the paper looks to a bright future. Last year it announced that the architect Renzo Piano will design a new home - a 52-storey skyscraper on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets scheduled for completion in 2005.

And in 100 years? Howard Raines in an editorial confidently predicts "we'll be here - one way or another". Would that we all could be so confident.

psmyth@irish-times