Subject: Arthur Butz and "Jewish control of the media" Lines: 45 Archive/File: people/b/butz.arthur butz.005 Last-Modified: 1994/07/05 "Butz dismissed the media as a 'lie machine' for disseminating the Holocaust legend. At the same time, however, he used the media's wartime failure to highlight news of the annihilation as proof that the story was false<36> (if it were true, the media would have stressed it). This 'explanation' ignored an array of other factors that governed the media's and much of the rest of the world's response to this story.<37>* It also failed to address the fact that all the Allied governments publicly condemned it in December 1942 and a number of papers did consistently feature the story, among them the _New Republic_, _Nation_, _PM_, the Hearst papers, and the Catholic journal _Commonweal_. Butz's 'explanation' had its own internal contradiction: How could the Jews have had such control over the media after the war but virtually none during it? Butz favorably contrasted the record of the Nazi press with that of the American media. The refusal of newspapers in the Third Reich to even mention the 'Jewish extermination claim' was evidence that it was on a higher level than the Allied press. Butz credited the German press for ignoring the propaganda about death camps and focusing its attention on 'legitimate' questions such as the 'extent and means of Jewish influence in the Allied press.'<38> Butz's citation of the Nazi press as an example of high-level journalism, when all forms of public information in the Third Reich were under absolute government control, is itself significant. So, too, is his description of the question of Jewish control of the media as a 'legitimate' one. These are remarkable indicators of his own worldview." (Lipstadt, 132) <37> See Deborah Lipstadt, "Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945" (New York, 1986) <38> Arthur Butz, "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century" (Torrence, California, 1976), p. 89 * The most significant was its unprecidented nature. Work Cited Lipstadt, Deborah E. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: The Free Press (A division of Macmillan, Inc.), 1993.
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