“Senior editors at … publishing houses still welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive New York restaurants and then lament that if they were to sign a contract with me on a new book, there would always be somebody in their publishing house who would object.” Thus the English historian David Irving, famous for his histories of Nazi Germany. He made these remarks last week in the opening statement to the lawsuit that he has brought against Penguin Books and Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University.
Year: 2000
LA Times gets it wrong
Getting It Very Wrong
How and why the L.A. Times failed in its report on Holocaust deniers
By Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor
Balanced Coverage?
In its article on “Danger in Denying the Holocaust?”, did the Los Angeles Times exercise the traditional journalistic canon of presenting both sides of a contentious issue, or did the paper fall into the trap of giving obvious falsehood equal space with the truth?
To survivors and experts on the Holocaust, there is little doubt that the Times and reporter Kim Murphy gave credence to the lies of the deniers in the name of journalistic impartiality.
“It is a sign of immaturity, and inexperience on the reporter’s part, to try and balance everything, because there are some things that can’t be balanced,” says Arthur Stern, a veteran of Bergen-Belsen and a Jewish Federation lay leader.
[…]
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, faults the Times’ report on the same basis, and also charges that the article suffered from a glaring omission.
“The reporter left out the most crucial element, namely the confessions of the war criminals themselves,” says Cooper. “The Nazis left an extensive paper trail and there are any number of quotes and statements by Himmler, Goebbels and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, clearly documenting the extent of the Holocaust.”
[…]
Source:
The Jewish Journal (Los Angeles)
COVER STORY | | January 14, 2000
www.jewishjournal.com/cover.tt.1.14.0.htm
Misleading, Inaccurate, Distorted, and Uninformed Reporting
Kim Murphy’s article “Danger in Denying the Holocaust” could be dismissed as amateurish at best were it not the Jan. 7 Column One story of the Los Angeles Times. Because of where it appeared, some of the issues it raised must be addressed. She doesn’t present the stakes in the Irving vs. Lipstadt libel case and she falls into the traps set by the deniers, hook, line and sinker.
Did Six Million Die for This?
‘Holocaustology’ May Create a New Form of Anti-Semitism
www.jewishworldreview.com — THE HOLOCAUST DOMINATED the moral imagination of the 20th century. Before the rise of Hitler, anti-Semitism was a parochial concern of the Jews; after the war it was everyone’s concern, and everyone regarded it with horror. The cause of anti-Semitism is a mystery to most Jews and most Gentiles. One school of thought, wrongly, I believe, blames anti-Semitism on Christianity itself.