Printing editorial corrections is a normal convention in newspapers. Even the venerable New York Times prints a long list of editorial corrections every day. On November 14, 2001 for example there were six: one was for mistakenly naming the aircraft carrier Constellation the Constitution; one was for misstating the location of a certain funeral; one was for misnaming a person in her obituary; one was for giving an incorrect name for the town in Oregon in which the late Ken Kesey lived; one corrected the misspelling of a certain German pastor's name, and the details of his fate at the hands of the Nazis; one corrected the cause of death of one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters; one corrected an error in the size of the homes in a South Texas low-cost housing project. "The Times," the paper always states in the Corrections section, "welcomes comments and suggestions, as well as information about errors that call for correction." And there's no doubt but that the newspaper's interest in correcting editorial errors is sincere. No paper worth its salt overlooks editorial errors, or neglects to print timely corrections.

Sometimes an error or an inaccuracy is so egregious it calls for a retraction and even further action. For example, The Cincinnati Enquirer printed a retraction in bold headlines on Sunday, June 28, 1998 because a story it printed very enthusiastically only a few weeks earlier was based on illegally obtained information. The paper apologized, renounced the story and agreed to pay the subject $10 million. The lead reporter on the story was also dismissed. That same week TIME Magazine published a story expressing doubts about a CNN broadcast and subsequent TIME article on the use of nerve gas in Laos. The story was widely discredited, and a CNN producer was dismissed.

In extreme cases, such as accusations of libel, ethical conventions alone aren't enough because legal requirements come into play. In the case of libel, the legal standard is generally that the plaintiff must provide a written request for a retraction prior to the filing of an action. For its part the newspaper defendant can prove that the offending publication was without malice. Or within a short period after receiving written notice the newspaper needs to publish a correction or retraction in a very conspicuous manner. It is also customary for the plaintiff to demand that the newspaper print an accompanying editorial. In any case, it goes without saying, newspapers are not infallible, and the process of owning up to editorial errors big and small is well established.

But on November 14, 2001 The New York Times went so far as to publish not just an extensive section of corrections but a page length apology for something the newspaper did 60 years ago, during World War II. No one was threatening the paper with a libel suit or demanding a retraction or any apology. Although authors and scholars have definitely criticized The Times in the past for its flawed reporting on certain critical events during the war. The fact is, people criticize newspapers every day for one reason or another. And while such criticism might manifest itself in a letter to the editor or a protest advertisement perhaps, publication of an entire page of editorial apology is unheard of.

This was a special case, however. The occasion for the remarkable apology was the newspaper's 150th anniversary feature in the scope of which the paper surveys its history takes stock and looks ahead. In this context, Max Frankel addressed the very painful and problematic issue of The New York Times' failure to report adequately on the Nazi annihilation of Europe's Jews.

In his famous study, The Abandonment of the Jews, about the impotence the world demonstrated on this score, David Wyman writes: "The New York Times printed considerable extermination related information during late November and December 1942. But except for a front page report on the UN Declaration it relegated that news to inside pages. Moreover, during the five Sundays of late November and December the paper's weekly ten page News of the Week in Review section included only one brief notice about the European Jewish tragedy. Yet The Times provided by far the most complete American coverage of Holocaust events." At first glance, it almost seems that The Times did not do so badly after all. But there is more to the story.

Wyman explains that since other newspapers recognized the superior foreign reporting resources of The Times they looked to it for guidance on foreign news policy. It is possible, Wyman says, that since the Jewish-owned Times did not stress the massive killing of Jews other papers followed suit, and also neglected to stress the story properly. There is also a possibility, according to Wyman, that since President Roosevelt failed until March 1944 to mention the extermination of the Jews in his press conferences, this also may have led editors to conclude that the issue was not important. States Wyman, "One reason ordinary Americans were not more responsive to the plight of the European Jews was that very many (probably a majority) were unaware of Hitler's extermination program until well into 1944 or later. The information was not readily available to the public, because the mass media treated the systematic murder of millions of Jews as though it were minor news."

Mass circulation magazines, like Time, Newsweek and Life, "all but ignored" the Holocaust, according to Wyman. Radio coverage of Holocaust news was "sparse," he says. "Those who wrote the newscasts and commentary programs seem hardly to have noticed the slaughter of the Jews." And filmmakers, says Wyman, "avoided the subject of the Jewish catastrophe. Although during the war Hollywood released numerous feature films on refugees and on Nazi atrocities, "none dealt with the Holocaust."

Continues Wyman, "Most newspapers printed very little about the Holocaust, even though extensive information on it reached their desks from the news services (AP, UPI and others) and from their own correspondents. In New York the Jewish-owned Post reported extermination news and rescue matters fairly adequately. PMs coverage was also more complete than that of most American papers. The Times, Jewish-owned, but anxious not to be seen as Jewish-oriented, was the premier American newspaper of the era. It printed a substantial amount of information on Holocaust-related events but almost always buried it on inner pages. To note one typical example, The Times on July 2, 1944, published 'authoritative information' that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths so far and 350,000 more were to be killed in the next 3 weeks. This news (which was basically accurate) received 4 column inches on page 12. The Times found room on the front page that day to analyze the problem of New York holiday crowds on the move."

Another example Wyman cites is the Jewish tragedy in France in the summer of 1942. He says that American newspaper readers could follow "the general configuration" of these events, since most metropolitan dailies provided fairly thorough coverage of the mass arrests that took place in Paris in mid-July. However, he points out, almost none reported the barbaric way 4000 children were stuffed into boxcars for shipment across the Continent with no provisions and no supervision.

Says Wyman, "Much of the French deportation story appeared in the American press. But it was almost never featured. For instance The New York Times published some 25 items but placed only 2 on the front page. Those reports reached page 1 apparently because they involved leaders of the Catholic Church. Even so, each story received only a few inches of type at the foot of the page. One told very little, the other nothing, about what was actually happening to the Jews. Other major newspapers generally conformed to the same pattern. They printed considerable information, but almost always on inner pages, and even then it was often barely noticeable." Remarkably, Max Frankel's lengthy editorial apology echoes important elements of Wyman's analysis.

For example, the caption for the article's central illustration reads: "DEAD AND BURIED On April 20, 1943, a Page 1 article about a conference on the 'refugee problem' said nothing about Jews and asserted, inside, that refugees were being considered part of 'a broad group' regardless of their religion. The execution of two million Jews was reported in an appended article of five paragraphs."

Frankel leads off with an earnest assessment of what happened: "The annihilation of six million Jews would not for many years become distinctively known as the Holocaust. But its essence became knowable fast enough, from ominous Nazi threats and undisputed eyewitness reports collected by American correspondents, agents and informants. Indeed, a large number of those reports appeared in The Times. But they were mostly buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible."

He continues, "While a few publications -- newspapers like The Post (then liberal) and PM in New York and magazines like The Nation and The New Republic -- showed more conspicuous concern, The Times's coverage generally took the view that the atrocities, inflicted upon Europe's Jews, while horrific, were not significantly different from those visited upon tens of millions of other war victims, nor more noteworthy."

No less remarkably, Frankel addresses the influence of the idiosyncratic Jewishness of the Sulzbergers, the family that owns The Times: "Papers owned by Jewish families, like The Times, were plainly afraid to have a society that was still widely anti-Semitic misread their passionate opposition to Hitler as a merely parochial cause." Although not exactly full bodied or robust, according to Frankel, Sulzberger's Jewishness had a deep effect on the paper's editorial psychology: "At The Times the reluctance to highlight the systematic slaughter of Jews was also undoubtedly influenced by the views of the publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. He believed strongly and publicly that Judaism was a religion, not a race or nationality -- that Jews should be separate only in the way they worshipped. He thought they needed no state or political and social institutions of their own. He went to great lengths to avoid having The Times branded a 'Jewish newspaper.' He resented other publications for emphasizing the Jewishness of people in the news."

The middle of the road principle of employing the least common editorial denominator also seems to have played a role in Sulzberger's downplaying the Holocaust: "It was his policy on most questions," says Frankel, "to steer The Times toward the centrist values of America's governmental and intellectual elites. Because his editorial page like the American government and other leading media refused to dwell on the Jews' singular victimization, it was cool to all measures that might have singled them out for rescue or even special attention."

After some paragraphs citing occasions on which The Times did place an adequate stress on relevant news or editorials about the extermination of Europe's Jews, Frankel candidly sums up: "No article about the Jews' plight ever qualified as The Times leading story of the day or as a major event of a week or year. The ordinary reader of its pages could hardly be blamed for failing to comprehend the enormity of the Nazi's crimes."

Be that as it may, after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the emergence of the unspeakable truths from the liberated camps, there were apparently much soul-searching and changes of heart at the newspaper's highest levels. Frankel briefly describes, for example, how Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger changed her own mind about the need for a Jewish state and then influenced her husband Arthur Hays Sulzberger to accept the idea of Israel. According to Frankel, "The Times shed its sensitivity about its Jewish roots, allowed Jews to ascend to the editor's chair and warmly supported Israel in many editorials."

This leaves the positive impression that The New York Times actually did have a change of heart. According to Frankel, after the War, the newspaper's owners went so far as to change their whole personal orientation to Judaism. And this change presumably filtered into the newspaper's editorial policies in its reporting on world Jewry across the board. So why did The New York Times fall so far from the mark in August 1991, in its reporting on the Crown Heights riots?

The riots in Crown Heights started after a Hasidic Jewish man accidentally swerved his car onto a sidewalk and fatally injured a black youngster. Claiming that the Jews were receiving preferential medical treatment at the scene of the accident the black community started to riot. According to The Times, for example, "The racial melee erupted after rumors spread among blacks that a private Hasidic ambulance had carried off 3 Hasidic men but had ignored the black child and his severely injured cousin." The same day, as a result of the rioting, a black mob attacked and killed 29-year-old Hasidic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum. This, according to The Times, "was an apparent retaliation for the death of 7 year old Gavin Cato who was struck by a car driven by a Hasid."

Regarding Yankel Rosenbaum's murder, William McGowan observes in a 1993 article, "The treatment columnists and editorialists gave Rosenbaum's killing stood in stark contrast with their response to the racially motivated murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager, in Bensonhurst two years earlier. This double standard was best illustrated by The Times editorial page, which published an editorial entitled "Racism, Accomplice to Murder" six days after Hawkins was killed. It was not until 14 months after Rosenbaum's murder, when suspect Lemrick Nelson was acquitted, that The Times got around to expressing "Shame and Alarm over Anti-Semitic Violence that reflected the pogroms of czarist Russia and Eastern Europe."

McGowan goes on to say that the news coverage "left little doubt" that the basic story of Crown Heights was one of black mobs attacking Jews in retaliation of Gavin Cato's death. But says McGowan "the focus on allegations of favoritism obscured the raw anti-Semitism that fueled the riots."

At the funeral of Gavin Cato, for example, McGowan says, "Banners commemorating the accident victim shared space with others that said things like 'Hitler did not do the job' while Al Sharpton caricatured Jews as 'diamond dealers.'" In general, says McGowan, the inflammatory statements of Sharpton and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry were downplayed. One key point, as McGowan points out, is that in Crown Heights, "reporters analyzed events as a culture clash, a long running feud between two groups equally at fault."

And indeed, The Times repeatedly equated the murder of the Jew Yankel Rosenbaum by blacks with the killing of black Gavin Cato by a Jew, as though one was essentially in retaliation for the other. But the fact is there was no such equation, and the riots by the Crown Heights black community were poisonously anti-semitic at heart. According to McGowan, the editorial policy of The Times had a particular agenda, which explains its misreporting of the Crown Heights riots. That agenda essentially is the way the paper placed a stress on "editorial diversity," or the increasing openness and orientation of newsrooms and editorial boards to ethnic minorities and their particular concerns.

"The diversity agenda," McGowan writes, "seems to have encouraged the press to follow a preconceived script -- one that turned out to be at odds with the facts and out of touch with the realities of a fractious multiethnic New York."

On that score, although after the War The Times may have reoriented and sensitized itself to issues vital to world Jewry, in 1990s New York the picture had changed. "Under the rubric of racial and gender "diversity" a (liberal) uniformity of opinion was being enforced on the press," states a National Review editorial from August 1993. "Diversity driven reporting," McGowan concludes, "has created a pattern of intellectual dishonesty and double standards that can only poison the well of public trust that true tolerance, as opposed to enforced diversity, requires to flourish."

But the ultimate proof of how badly The Times missed the mark on the Crown Heights story is not journalistic or racial in character, but legal. On Thursday, April 2, 1998, the City of New York announced a settlement, approved by a United States District Judge, of the federal civil rights lawsuit brought by the Estate of Yankel Rosenbaum and others against the City of New York and ex-Mayor David Dinkins. As the Mayor's office press release states, "That lawsuit concerned the violent anti-Semitic rioting that occurred for three days in August 1991." The amount of the settlement was $1.1 million.

The press release also quotes the report of Richard Girgenti to ex-Governor Cuomo released in 1993. "The rioting represented the most extensive racial unrest in New York City in over twenty years. It differed from most other disturbances throughout the turbulent 1960s. . . as the violence was directed at one segment of the population."

Girgenti's report continues, "The week began with Gavin Cato's tragic death in an automobile accident and the senseless and reprehensible murder of Yankel Rosenbaum on Monday night and continued with intense anti-Semitic violence against the people of Crown Heights throughout that night and over the next several days.”

A corollary to the story of the anti-Semitic character of the Crown Heights riots which The Times did not report, is the story of how an insufficient number of police were ordered into Crown Heights to keep the peace. This begs the question of whether there is a cause and effect relationship between the two. In other words, if The Times had not followed its politically correct editorial agenda and actually reported the facts; if it had not created a false and ultimately harmful equation between black and Jewish behavior, perhaps it would have been clear to Mayor Dinkins and other key staff in the city administration that there was indeed a case of black mob violence against Jews in Crown Heights and the needed ranks of police would have been sent in.

Expansive apologies notwithstanding, The New York Times reporting on Crown Heights proves that it is not favorably disposed toward Jews necessarily. In terms of the big picture, the Jews are, after all, a tiny minority. Other minorities meanwhile have flexed their muscles and exerted their influence in society, in politics, in commerce, and in journalism to a greater measure than Jews have. After all, that's how the process of "diversity" works.

In the final analysis, The Times decision to report the Crown Heights riots as falsely as it did was Darwinian. The Times essentially followed a process of journalistic natural selection with preferential treatment for the aggressors while acquiescing to the dictates of "diversity." But however "ethically" The Times may have believed it was reporting the events in Crown Heights, the fact is the Girgenti report to ex-Governor Cuomo and the federal district court had the last word. In the matter of the Crown Heights riots, rigorous legal standards of evidence and truth ultimately prevailed over the blurred and subjective journalistic ones The Times used. So, even if it wasn't as originally reported in the country's "newspaper of record," at least the truth finally came out.

This is Jonathan Silverman's third article on the Jewish Defense League website. He can be reached through email .