Ben Yagoda
WSJ, Apr. 8, 2022
“None of the other publishers were as blatantly pro-Nazi, but Ms. Olmsted shows—through her industrious forays into and judicious use of the archives, correspondence and secondary literature—that all of them were racist and anti-Semitic.”
As the dictator sent his occupying forces across a neighboring country’s borders, the international press was outraged. Most of it was, anyway. One major American outlet’s reaction was, in essence: There’s nothing to see here. “After all,” it said of the autocrat, “he’s occupying his own territory.”
No, that’s not some present-day talking head holding forth on Vladimir Putin and Ukraine. Rather, it was the New York Daily News in 1936, after Adolf Hitler occupied the Rhineland. The comment was by no means an isolated one. In “The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler,” Kathryn S. Olmsted places it more or less in the middle of a remarkable and shameful history. Her subjects are Lord Rothermere of Britain’s Daily Mail; Max Beaverbrook of the Daily Express, which vied with the Daily Mail to be the biggest-selling newspaper in the country; Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune; Joseph Patterson of the Daily News; his sister, Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson, of the Washington Times-Herald; and William Randolph Hearst, who controlled 28 American newspapers. Together, this group’s publications reached some 50 million Americans and 16 million Britons every day.
Ms. Olmsted documents how, throughout the 1930s and even into the ’40s, these proprietors, who controlled both the editorial and news content of their papers, consistently and purposefully minimized the Nazi threat and opposed American or British intervention against it. Indeed, she writes, they “generally supported” Hitler’s goals “as they saw them—order, anti-communism, ‘racial purity’ and Anglo-Saxon domination.”
Mr. Yagoda, an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Delaware, is the author of “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made.”
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