In the pages of their newspapers, they downplayed Hitler's threat
In most accounts of the fight against Nazi Germany, the Americans and the British get to be the good guys. But in “The Newspaper Axis,” Kathryn S. Olmsted levels a damning indictment against six of the most powerful English-language publishers of the World War II era. Although they claimed to be patriots, they used their influence to downplay, condone and sometimes even promote Adolf Hitler’s rise.
The worst offender was Lord Harold Rothermere, publisher of London’s Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid that sold more than 1 million copies a day. A supporter of Britain’s fascist Blackshirts, Rothermere gushed in print about how Hitler had “saved his country” from ineffectual leaders and had brought “immense benefits” to Germany (Rothermere was even more fawning in the private letters he addressed to “my dear Führer”).
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The isolationist American publishers showed a hatred for Japan that they couldn’t seem to muster against Germany — and not just because of Pearl Harbor. Hearst had a long history of vicious anti-Asian racism, and Joe Patterson nursed a fear that with Whites distracted by their squabbles in Europe, the “yellow race,” led by Japan, might take over the world. The “vilest deed” of Nazi Germany, stated one Hearst editorial from 1943, was to ally “against its own white race with the yellow peril.”
Another unifying trait among the newspaper axis was their antisemitism. They espoused conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in government and believed that Jews themselves were to blame for antisemitism. So they had little sympathy for European Jews suffering at Hitler’s hands, and they suspected that American Jews were scheming to force the nation into war — an insinuation that appeared routinely in their editorials.
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