Why Is the New York Times Legitimizing a Holocaust Denier?

My new essay at The Bulwark responds to the New York Times’s egregious euphemism for Holocaust denial. Here is the gist: 

Why Is the New York Times Legitimizing a Holocaust Denier? 

IT WAS SHOCKING, although not surprising, to see Tucker Carlson praise the prominent Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, who said Adolph Hitler was a peacemaker and called Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II. But it was even more shocking—as well as dismaying and disheartening— when the New York Times conferred some credibility on Cooper by repeatedly describing him as merely a “Holocaust revisionist” rather than an outright denier.

The New York Times reported two stories on the Cooper-Carlson connection, both with misleadingly anodyne headlines: “Tucker Carlson Sharply Criticized for Hosting Holocaust Revisionist,” and “Vance Declines to Denounce Carlson After Interview With Holocaust Revisionist.”

I INITIALLY ASSUMED that the Times’s “Holocaust revisionist” headlines had been written in haste by an uninformed editor and would therefore be quickly corrected, given that the articles themselves correctly refer to Cooper’s “false claims.”

I wrote to the two reporters and received this reply: “It's an interesting question and one we wrestled with. Classic Holocaust deniers say either the Holocaust didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. Cooper conceded that millions of Jews died. He is questioning the motives and methods.”

This is a meaningless, and credulous, distinction.

The Times headlines normalize Cooper’s pretension to legitimacy. They ignore the vast gulf between unintended starvation, which Cooper falsely claims, and premeditated mass murder, which is what actually happened.

You can read the full essay at The Bulwark.