The Times’ annual shame: Covering up genocide
Rathergate.com
Every year, The New York Times proudly prints its long and distinguished list of Liberal Medal of Honor Pulitzer Prize winners. And on April 5, like every previous year, the Times recognizes the worst journalist in American history.
For those of you unfamiliar with history, Walter Duranty was an accomplice to millions of deaths. People remember Jayson Blair, but all he murdered was the truth. Let’s take a look at the Times’ very first Jayson Blair (that we know of).
Walter Duranty was the Times’ correspondent in the Soviet Union during the reign of dictator Josef Stalin. In exchange for access to the Soviet strongman, Duranty whitewashed Stalin’s numerous atrocities, most notably the Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933.
For those of you unfamiliar with what the Ukrainians (the fact that there are any Ukrainians left after Stalin and Hitler is a testament to their tenacity) call the Holodomor, Stalin decided that the quickest way to “Russify” the Ukraine was to starve and kill its inhabitants. Stalin turned the most fertile part of the continent — Ukraine was called the “breadbasket of Europe” — into a killing field.
Conservative estimates start at 6 million dead. But this wasn’t news to Duranty, who admired Stalin’s heavy hand and did not want to lose Stalin as a source. He was the Eason Jordan of the World War II era; if you remember, Jordan admitted in April 2003 that CNN covered up Hussein atrocities to maintain its Baghdad bureau.
The best Duranty did for his readers was to concede that there were “serious food shortages” in Ukraine, but that rumors of mass starvation were false. Historians agree that Duranty damned well knew what the truth was — he told the British embassy off the cuff that 10 million had perished and that Ukraine “had been bled white.”
How did Duranty treat the massacre? Well, a famous saying you’ve likely used in your day-to-day life is attributed to him. In a March 1933 dispatch regarding Stalin’s collectivization of farms (which in itself killed 5 million “kulaks,” or well-off peasants with their own land), Duranty said, “But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
For his coverage of the Soviet Union, the Pulitzer committee awarded Duranty the top prize in 1932, for coverage before the Holodomor truly hit full steam. This is why the Times still clings to the tainted prize and the hollow wretch of a man who won it — he did not win it for his fraudulent “coverage” (or lack thereof) of the famine. The Times corporation’s on-line list of Pulitzer winners lists a footnote that much of Duranty’s work has been discredited.
However, a lot of Duranty’s “discredited” work includes the stories about the Five-Year Plan that won him the Pulitzer to begin with. Author S.J. Brown, who wrote a book on Duranty called “Stalin’s Apologist: The New York Times Man in Moscow,” chronicled Duranty’s propaganda veiled as journalism in sickening detail.
The Times lists Duranty as a Pulitzer winner, despite continual and unceasing howls from Ukrainian groups who want the Times to set its record straight. The Pulitzer committee refuses to withdraw the prize, a power which the committee has used before — it withdrew its 1981 Pulitzer to Janet Cooke of the Washington Post after learning that her story was a complete fabrication).
The Times’ lame excuse is that the Pulitzer board has twice investigated Duranty’s work and both times declined to revoke the prize. Also, the Times “does not have the award in its possession.” So under Times logic, it cannot distance itself from the prize unless it actually possesses it.
Let’s not mince words here — it is completely within the power of the Times to strike Duranty from its honor roll. It is completely within the power of the Times to distance itself from Duranty and his fraudulent reporting. But seven decades later, the Times still refuses to do the right thing.
The Times has produced some outstanding journalism from the former Soviet Union. As a studier of Russian, I have read, re-read and read again Hedrick Smith’s landmark book “The New Russians.” But all the good journalism in the world cannot wash Duranty’s stain from the Old Gray Lady.
If you remain unconvinced, visit Holodomor sites such as the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the official Holodomor Website (in Ukrainian and English), and the Ukrainian Archive. If I’ve gotten you fired up enough, each site has links to e-mail the Times or sign petitions to right this grievous wrong.
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