COMMENTARY: The 24/7 News Cycle, Circa 1933

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) As an avid viewer of cable TV news channels, I always wonder whether history might have been far different if today’s 24/7 electronic media had existed during the 1920s and 1930s as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Saturation TV coverage and its graphic imagery […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As an avid viewer of cable TV news channels, I always wonder whether history might have been far different if today’s 24/7 electronic media had existed during the 1920s and 1930s as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany.

Saturation TV coverage and its graphic imagery decisively shape attitudes and opinions. What the news channels choose to emphasize _ and what they omit or distort _ influences public policies and perceptions.


How would the obscene Nazis have appeared on television screens?

Back then, Americans learned about Hitler and his gang of murderous, anti-Semitic thugs from mostly cautious newspaper reports, grainy black-and-white newsreels, shortwave radio broadcasts and the personal testimonies of refugees like Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann, both of whom fled Germany for the safety of the United States.

In May 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, “anti-German” books were publicly burned in Berlin. The global news channels would surely have shown young Nazis gleefully tossing 25,000 “degenerate” works into the flaming bonfire. Just imagine if TV had covered the physical beatings and whippings carried out by sadistic Nazi stormtroopers against political rivals, labor leaders, intellectuals and Jews.

In March 1938, following the Nazi takeover of Austria, Vienna’s 75-year-old chief rabbi, Israel Taglicht, and many other Jews were forced to their knees and compelled to use their bare hands and toothbrushes to clean the Austrian capital’s pavements. What would have been the reaction if those acts of public humiliation had been televised throughout the world?

Or imagine if the horrific Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938 had been covered by TV. In one night, 30,000 German and Austrian Jews were arrested and sent to Buchenwald and Dachau, which at the time were little-known concentration camps. A total of 191 synagogues were burned; 76 were completely destroyed, and nearly a thousand Jewish-owned businesses were attacked by marauding Nazi gangs who acted with the knowledge and support of the Berlin government.

Even if Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi minister of propaganda, had banned American TV networks from Germany in the 1930s, there is little doubt that incriminating TV tapes would have been smuggled out, even as tapes are today smuggled out of dictatorships such as North Korea.

We can be certain the TV networks would have covered the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, that sparked World War II. Cameras would have been there when German troops burned Polish synagogues and used their fingers to physically remove beards of pious Jews.

TV would also have been there when a Warsaw radio station heroically played a Chopin “Polonaise” just as the Nazis cut off the last free broadcast from Poland.


Closer to home, in May 1939, four months before the start of World War II, 907 Jews sailed from Germany to Havana where they were assured of refugee status. But in an act of betrayal, Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista refused to let them land. The passengers sailed to Miami, hoping to find haven in the United States. Incredibly, our government also refused the Jews entry, and the ship St. Louis was forced to return to Europe still carrying its doomed human cargo.

Would TV images of the frightened St. Louis passengers have influenced America’s cruel immigration policy of the 1930s? Network cameras would have been all over that sad, tragic voyage, and perhaps, just perhaps, the 907 helpless Jews would have been permitted to become our fellow American citizens, free of the Nazi threat to their lives.

If Batista’s cynicism and the callousness of the U.S. government had been a continuing TV story in 1939, would the gates of freedom been opened just a bit to allow those desperate people to escape the Nazi regime?

Sadly, we will never know, but I think about it a lot. I cry a little each time I watch the extensive global coverage on today’s news channels.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

KRE/PH END RUDIN

Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.


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