Yes, the Gray Lady’s chief correspondent in Berlin, Otto Tolischus, helped the Nazis soften Hitler’s image, and often parroted their propaganda (“reporting,” on Sept. 1, 1939, that Poland had invaded Germany); Walter Duranty, her man in Moscow, wrote admiringly of Stalin, and not only denied the famine in Ukraine (which “reportage” he later privately admitted was a lie) but deeming the show trials legitimate; and all throughout the Holocaust our “newspaper of record” ran only intermittent snippets on it, buried deep on inside pages, and carefully obscuring the key fact that Hitler was primarily exterminating Jews.
The Times’ disgraceful record on the Holocaust is carefully recounted in Laurel Leff’s book Buried by the Times; Duranty’s record as a PR hack for Stalin (“You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” was actually the reporter’s line) is the subject of Stalin’s Apologist by S.J. Taylor; and both those scandals, as well as Tolischus’ service to the Nazis, and several other shocking journalistic failures, are meticulously covered in Ashley Rindsberg’s excellent The Gray Lady Winked, forthcoming on May 3, from Midnight Oil Press (with a foreword by myself).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/briefing/derek-chauvin-trial-matt-gaetz-taiwan-crash.html