Summary of Ashley Rindsberg's The Gray Lady Winked

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The New York Times made the worst prediction in the history of modern journalism when they reported that Hitler would retire to private life and return to Austria. He went on to construct one of the darkest regimes, and he was the last person a reader of the Times should think was no longer to be feared.

#2 On August 31, 1939, Hitler launched one of the most flagrant scams in the history of the modern world. He and a group of Gestapo propagandists and henchmen invented a story that neighboring Poland had attacked Germany, and the Second World War began.

#3 The New York Times was also guilty of reporting on the events in Gleiwitz as if they were true, when they very well knew they were not. When the Times reported on the details of the supposed Polish attack, they left out one critical fact: the semi-official news agency cited as the article’s main source was one of the Nazis’ central propaganda organs.

#4 The Times printed the claim that the incident at the Gleiwitz radio station was the signal for a general attack by Poland, which was taken directly from the Nazi Party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter. But the Times article failed to mention that its single source was the official newspaper of the NSDAP.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669388807

IRB Media

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Insights on Ashley Rindsberg's The Gray Lady Winked

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The New York Times made the worst prediction in the history of modern journalism when they reported that Hitler would retire to private life and return to Austria. He went on to construct one of the darkest regimes, and he was the last person a reader of the Times should think was no longer to be feared.

#2

On August 31, 1939, Hitler launched one of the most flagrant scams in the history of the modern world. He and a group of Gestapo propagandists and henchmen invented a story that neighboring Poland had attacked Germany, and the Second World War began.

#3

The New York Times was also guilty of reporting on the events in Gleiwitz as if they were true, when they very well knew they were not. When the Times reported on the details of the supposed Polish attack, they left out one critical fact: the semi-official news agency cited as the article’s main source was one of the Nazis’ central propaganda organs.

#4

The Times printed the claim that the incident at the Gleiwitz radio station was the signal for a general attack by Poland, which was taken directly from the Nazi Party newspaper Volkischer Beobachter. But the Times article failed to mention that its single source was the official newspaper of the NSDAP.

#5

Hitler’s plan to start the war with an act of historical deception was calculated for a number of reasons. He first had to rally the German people, who, on the eve of the war, seemed to want things to stay that way.

#6

The Gleiwitz Incident, used to achieve this crucial delay, was a crude piece of propaganda. The operation was supervised directly by one of the Gestapo’s darkest stars, Reinhard Heydrich, who had been handpicked by Himmler to lead the Sicherheitsdienst, comprising the Gestapo, the secret state police, and the Nazi criminal police organization, the Kriminalpolizei.

#7

The New York Times’s coverage of the Munich Conference in 1938 was a major landmark in the paper’s pre-war reporting. The Times took a skeptical approach to the Berlin Olympics in the lead-up to the games, but after the games, its reporting was completely committed to adulation for the Nazi Olympics.

#8

The Olympics were a grand showing of Nazi Germany, complete with boasts of German racial superiority, in 1935. But for the Times reporter, who had been a fairly senior editor before returning to reporting, the Olympics would reveal the true nature of Nazi Germany.

#9

By 1935, a clear pattern had emerged in the New York Times’s reporting on Nazi Germany.