The Holocaust. The A-Bomb. U.S. imperialism.

The crimes committed against humanity and journalism by the New York Times in the 20^th century are so huge and numerous they fill three new volumes from Cambridge University Press, Common Courage Press, and Verso.

In Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, Laurel Leff condemns Times Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger for keeping the Nazis' atrocities against the Jews off Page One during World War II. Beverly Ann Deepe Keever's News Zero: The New York Times and the Bomb accuses the newspaper of advancing U.S. government propaganda about nuclear weapons. And Howard Friel and Richard Falk's The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy blames U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq on the Times because, among other things, it hasn't properly explained to its readers how international law prohibits military adventurism.

And I thought I gave the Times a hard time.

Buried by the Times makes the most persuasive case against the paper, arguing that it failed in its journalistic mission by not explaining that Hitler was killing Jews because they were Jews. Leff counts 1,186 stories about the Jews of Europe in the paper between the war's start in 1939 and its conclusion in 1945. Only 26 of those stories made it to Page One, and only six of them explicitly stated that Jews were the main target of the Nazis.

"No American newspaper was better positioned to highlight the Holocaust than the Times, and no American newspaper so influenced public discourse by its failure to do so," she writes.

By the time the paper celebrated its 150^th anniversary in 2001, it agreed so fully with Leff's assessment that former executive editor Max Frankel cited her work in a Times feature.

"No single explanation seems to suffice for what was surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure. The Times, like most media of that era, fervently embraced the wartime policies of the American and British governments, both of which strongly resisted proposals to rescue Jews or to offer them haven," Frankel writes.

The Times avoided highlighting the Jewish plight because 1) its Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, insisted that the paper take a centrist line similar to the government's on most issues; and 2) because Sulzberger didn't want to plead special status for his tribe—acting as a "Jewish" rather than American publisher—when the whole world was aflame.

Keever's News Zero reads like something from the slush pile at The Nation: well-researched, but as pedantic and repetitious as a lecture from your lefty grandfather. The book retells the story of how the Times lent its science reporter, William L. Laurence, to the military for a couple of months to document the last stages of the Manhattan Project. His War Department press releases and later Times A-bomb stories de-emphasized the long-term dangers of radioactivity, Keever insists, and began the decadeslong collusion between the paper and the government in which the Times ignored nuclear atrocities committed against Pacific Islanders, nuclear industry production workers, and U.S. soldiers and sailors.

Friel and Falk devote most of The Record of the Paper to holding the Times culpable for the Iraq invasion. The paper's 50-year neglect of educating readers about the supremacy of international law has allowed the U.S. government to run wild in Indochina, South America, and Central America, they assert. Even Times-haters will have trouble choking this one down, since the international-law thesis The Record of the Paper is built around isn't commonly subscribed to let alone universally held. Also, one doubts that the Times could have avoided the botch that was its weapons-of-mass-destruction coverage by instructing its reporters and editorialists to bone up on international law.