The Times’ obfuscation of these two US-backed genocides is part of a broader pattern. In newly published research, my co-author Tianhong Yin and I delved into the paper’s archive to look at how it covered post-World War II atrocities that are now understood by experts as genocides. We compared the Times’ treatment of genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia—cases in which the US was either not directly involved, or, as in Bosnia, ostensibly engaged in “genocide prevention”—to genocides like that, like Gaza, featured active American assistance to the aggressors. Specifically, we looked at the number of Times articles that referenced each country from the start of the genocide period up to 2020, as well as the number that included contested language like “genocide,” “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocity.”
Our results were clear: The historical events that the New York Times has most clearly remembered as genocides, as crimes that demand outrage and accountability, are those where American complicity was not part of the story. But in cases where the US facilitated mass violence, the Times is much more apt to omit the genocide label or avoid mentioning the situation entirely. Such is the case with East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The US oversaw the transfer of weaponry to its ally West Pakistan, which in 1971 conducted a campaign of mass murder and rape against the largely Bengali inhabitants of East Pakistan. So too in Guatemala, where throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the US installed, armed, and trained a string of military dictatorships that prosecuted a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency, including the mass rape and murder of the indigenous Maya in what is now known as a “silent holocaust.” Each of these wars claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, but in the pages of the Times they have quickly receded into obscurity.
Ultimately, these omissions are part of an American “culture of impunity,” one that cannot be laid at the feet of any single media organization. But as the “paper of record” self-consciously publishing what is often referred to as the “first draft of history,” the Times nevertheless holds a particularly powerful position in representing—as well as influencing—the liberal mainstream. As such, it can be argued that the Times’ silences have helped sustain what genocide studies scholar Jeff Bachman calls the US’s “near-continuous stream of violence and atrocities” well into the present. After all, an American public steeped in the responsibility it bears for the atrocities of Timor, Bangladesh, and Guatemala, among others, would have been more likely to recognize how history was repeating itself in Gaza. By failing to foster such an awareness, the Times has contributed to a collective amnesia that has stymied accountability, most recently for US participation in Israel’s genocide.