Reporting the Holocaust: a Trend of Insufficient and Subjective Reporting

Reporting on the Holocaust, both during World War II and in the years following, varied from country to country. In Sweden, there was largely a lack of reporting due to state censorship, possibly in an effort to uphold their neutral status in the war. In Finland, an ally of Germany at the time, there was specifically a lack of reporting about Jews and Jewish suffering. In Britain, a country in the allied forces of the war, the news was focused on the Germans as the perpetrators more than it framed Jewish people as the victims. In the United States, the New York Times withheld reporting about Jews because, at least according to some observers, the editor was Jewish and may have wanted to avoid subjective reporting or giving “special treatment” to the Jews’ situation. All of these cases lead to the same result, which was subjective and insufficient reporting driven by political beliefs or general self serving motives. In this paper, I argue that these lapses in media coverage reveal a pattern of disinformation, defined as false or misleading narratives, that continues to resurface in twenty-first-century denials of Jewish suffering.https://orb.binghamton.edu/research_days_posters_2022/1059/thumbnail.jp