Coverage of the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime in the American press, 1939-1945 (content analysis of the New York Times))

This article examines the coverage of the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime in the American press during World War II (1939–1945) using the materials of the New York Times newspaper as an example. The relevance of the topic is due to the need to understand the mechanisms of public opinion formation in democratic societies and the influence of the foreign policy context on the editorial policy of even independent media. The object of the study is the US media discourse on the Holocaust, and the subject is the specifics of presenting information about the genocide of Jews in a particular publication. The study employs a comprehensive approach combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The source base consisted of 885 articles selected from the digital archive of The New York Times. These materials were obtained through automated metadata collection (including article headline, publication date, page number, author, URL linking to the article in the archive, etc.) via the newspaper’s API using a Python script. Subsequently, a qualitative analysis was conducted, during which the materials were coded according to the following categories: “geography of crimes,” “forms of persecution,” and “publication volume.” In the final stage, the results were visualized and analyzed using Tableau. The main objectives of the study include: analyzing the dynamics of publications by year and month; classifying materials according to the forms of harassment and the geography of events; evaluating the placement of articles in the newspaper (page number) and their volume; identifying the relationship between editorial policy and the foreign policy interests of the United States. The results show that the key events of the Holocaust were often hushed up, published on secondary pages or without emphasis on the Jewish specifics of the tragedy. Most attention was paid to the events in France and Poland, while crimes in the occupied territories of the USSR were covered extremely poorly. It was found that even in the "independent" press, editorial decisions were influenced by ideological stereotypes and geopolitical attitudes. The scientific novelty of the work consists in conducting the first in Russian historiography continuous quantitative analysis of the materials of The New York Times for the specified period using digital methods. The research contributes to understanding the role of media in constructing historical memory of the Holocaust and demonstrates the potential of synthesizing traditional historical approaches with the tools of computerized analysis of historical texts.