It argues that the news was often buried in the back pages in part due to the view about Judaism of the paper's Jewish publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

The Times consistently placed major stories about the Nazi treatment of European Jews on back pages "by the soap and shoe polish ads".

In December 1942 in a memo to New York Times staff he wrote "I have been trying to instruct the people around here on the subject of the word 'Jews', i.e., that they are neither a race nor a people, etc.,"[3] Former New York Times journalist Ari Goldman, in his review of the book, writes: "There can be little doubt that Sulzberger's views about Judaism trickled down to the editors making the decisions about what to put in the newspaper every day.

"[3] While back in New York, Sulzberger's bias was shared by other Jewish staffers: "Between them and influential Catholics among the crucial night editors, who decided where to place news items, the imperiled Jews of Europe had no advocate in the newsroom.

[9][10] English historian David Cesarani, reviewing the book in the Jewish Chronicle, wrote: "The light which Laurel Leff sheds on US government policy adds to the value of her densely documented and judiciously written study.

"[13] Daniel Johnson, writing in Commentary, wrote: "Leff's Excellent book is more than an indictment of the Times's willful myopia; it also investigates how and why it came about ...

"[15] Historian Severin Hochberg of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum commented that Leff does "an especially good job of demonstrating how much credible information was in fact available to the far-flung corps of New York Times European correspondents ...

It is meticulously researched, and adds greater depth to our knowledge of a subject originally addressed in Deborah Lipstadt's Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust.

"[16] A review in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote: "s a veteran of newsrooms, she brings to her analysis something many media scholars lack—a common-sense understanding of how news gets produced and published.

"[18] Mark Feldstein of George Washington University wrote of the book: "This book is a searing indictment, but it is buttressed by meticulous and broad research drawing on an impressive array of primary source materials, including numerous archives and interviews...It is passionately written yet nuanced and complex-careful not to overstate evidence, to disclose gaps in the historical record, and to offer measured and qualified conjectures when necessary to explain events.This account exemplifies the best of journalism history by tackling a subject of true significance with a range that reaches beyond the discipline.

"[20] A reviewer in History: The Journal of the Historical Association wrote: "Importantly Leff anchors her analysis in a detailed investigation of how the paper worked – from the political sympathies of its correspondents in the field to the editorial policies of those who decided what prominence to give individual stories.

Her research paper "Rebuffing Refugee Journalists: The Profession's Failure to Help Jews Persecuted by Nazi Germany" asserting that journalists, unlike physicians and attorneys, failed to establish committees to help Jewish refugees secure positions that would have made them exempt from immigration limits and allowed them to come to the United States, inspired a campaign to get the Newspaper Association of America to acknowledge its predecessor organization in the 1930s "was wrong to turn its back on Jewish refugee journalists fleeing Hitler".