The New York Times’ Jewish owners, the Sulzbergers, have for decades tried to make sure that no one could accuse them of being partial to Jews, or to Israel, in their coverage. In the 1930s and during the war, the Times deliberately underreported the torment endured by the Jews of Europe.

In her study "Buried By the Times", Laurel Leff shows how The Times consistently placed major stories about the Nazi treatment of European Jews on back pages “by the soap and shoe polish ads.” Leff found that during the period September 1939 to May 1945, very few stories about Jewish victims made the Times front page. “The story of the Holocaust—meaning articles that focused on the discrimination, deportation, and destruction of the Jews—made the Times front page just 26 times, and only in six of those stories were Jews identified on the front as the primary victims.”

Leff points out that the Times often used a more generic term, such as “refugee” or “nationality” to refer to Nazi victims who were Jewish. In his review of her book, Gal Beckerman writes, “More shocking even than the chronic burying of articles with the word ‘Jew’ in them is how often that word was rubbed out of articles that specifically dealt with the Jewish condition. It’s almost surreal at times. How could you possibly tell the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without mentioning Jews? But The Times did, describing how ‘500,000 persons … were herded into less than 7 percent of Warsaw’s buildings,’ and how ‘400,000 persons were deported’ to their deaths at Treblinka. As Leff put it, The Times, ‘when it ran front-page stories, described refugees seeking shelter, Frenchmen facing confiscation, or civilians dying in German camps, without making clear the refugees, Frenchmen, and civilians were mostly Jews.'”

The Times was distinctly disinterested in the war the Arabs conducted in 1948 to snuff out the young life of the Jewish state. The paper gave short shrift, too, to the 900,000 Jews who were expelled or fled from Arab lands. Through the 1950s, the paper largely ignored the Egyptian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, but deplored Israel’s invasion of the Sinai in 1956 to put an end to those attacks. It never reported on the Syrian gunfire that rained down from the Golan Heights on Jewish farmers far below. It failed to report on the Jordanian army’s blowing up of 55 synagogues in the Old City, and on its uprooting of tens of thousands of gravestones in the ancient Jewish cemetery at the Mount of Olives, some to be crushed into gravel for use as building material, and others used to line the floors of army latrines. No record of this in the paper of record.

And recently the Times has been outdoing itself with its anti-Israel columnists, such as Nicholas Kristof and Tom Friedman, and guest contributors including Peter Beinart and Mustafa Akyol.