"During the first several months of the war in Europe, the American press provided sporadic information about the plight of the Jews in Poland. The Yiddish press and the JTA were among the only sources providing daily accounts of Jewish suffering. Not all of the news was accurate or complete. Fragmentary and exaggerated dispatches made it difficult at times to determine the extent of the devastation. Yet the Contemporary Jewish Record (CJR), a bimonthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, stated in its November/December 1939 issue that "despite the paucity of reliable news from the invaded Polish areas, it is now possible to obtain a fairly accurate but general picture of the fate suffered by Polish Jewry during the first two months of the war." (1)
First reports from Poland told of Nazi air raids on Polish cities where the Jewish sections were intentionally targeted. Mendel Mozes, chief of the Warsaw Bureau of the JTA, visited a number of these areas and found that many Jews had been killed and wounded with extensive damage to Jewish institutions. His eyewitness account of the destruction was broadcast throughout the United States. (2)"
What did they know? American Jews and the Shoah
And this is interesting...apparently the NYT hasn't changed much:
"The (ny) Times generally relegated the news concerning Jews to the inside or back pages of the paper."