| |
OPINION, Moscow on the Potomac
By Matt Bivens from Washington for The Moscow Times
Moscow, Russia, Monday, June 16, 2003. Page 10
WASHINGTON -- America's most coveted journalism award is the Pulitzer
Prize, and The New York Times has collected 89 of them. But now one of
those Pulitzers is being challenged because the honored reporter was a
fraud.
Is this about Jayson Blair, the whiz kid whose faked articles have deeply
embarrassed his paper? Yes and no.
The prize in question was won in 1932 by Walter Duranty for "excellence in
reporting" out of the Soviet Union. That same year, the Stalin regime sealed
the borders of Ukraine, ordered the confiscation of grain, and engineered a
mass famine -- one so neatly political that it stopped precisely at the
Ukrainian-Russian internal border.
The Soviets called it "collectivization," the forcing of millions of people
into collective farms. Ukrainians in America refer to it as the Holodomor --
roughly, the Famine-Genocide -- and they consciously use a capital "H" in
imitation of the Holocaust.
The Holocaust -- the killing of about 6 million Jews, along with some 3
million Soviet POWs and thousands of Gypsies -- is woven into the textbooks,
the consciousness and the monuments of nations everywhere.
And the Holodomor? It claimed some 7 million innocents. At its height, while
the Soviets exported thousands of tons of grain to the West, Ukrainians were
dying at a rate of 25,000 per day. Yet no one has heard of it. Every
November, the U.S. president sends a short letter to Ukrainians marking the
tragedy. Other than that, it passes virtually unmentioned.
To understand how the Holodomor slipped down the memory hole, one has to
look back to the 1930s. The Great Depression was on, and in the West
communism was admired or feared. That, plus the Soviet practice of deporting
critics, soon filled the Moscow foreign press corps with apologists for
Stalin.
Duranty was not alone. (Another apologist, Eugene Lyons of UPI, repented and
wrote one of my favorite books, "Assignment in Utopia." Check out chapter
XV, "The Press Corps Conceals a Famine," at
http://www.colley.co.uk/garethjones/soviet_articles/assignment_in_utopia.htm)
But Duranty was unusually cynical. He would talk about millions of famine
deaths, and then add, "But they're only Russians," and, "you can't make an
omelette without breaking eggs." And incredibly, he won the Pulitzer for
reporting in 1931 on Stalin's Five-Year Plans.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Holodomor, and in January the
Ukrainian Congress Committee of America launched a campaign to have
Duranty's Pulitzer rescinded. The Pulitzer board is formally studying that.
But in the past, the board has split hairs, arguing that Duranty's Pulitzer
was for reporting that predated the famine and had nothing to do with it,
while The New York Times has taken the position that its own pages have
since denounced and debunked Duranty's work, and his Pulitzer is displayed
with an asterisk to that effect at Times' headquarters. And that's
apparently good enough.
So, a cub reporter publishes a string of articles that plagiarize or
embellish upon some pretty minor realities -- and this provokes a monster
mea culpa on the front page detailing the paper's sins, followed by the
resignations of its editors. Meanwhile, another reporter is known to have
been a serial liar, someone who actively worked over many years to cover up
the equivalent of the Holocaust -- and The New York Times admits as much,
yet feels OK holding on to his Pulitzer.
Doesn't that tarnish the other 88?
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The Moscow Times, writes the Daily Outrage
for The Nation magazine, New York. www.thenation.com. Letters-to-the
Editor: http://www.thenation.com/contact/lett
The Moscow Times, Moscow, Russia, Monday, June 16, 2003
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/06/16/007.html
Letters to the Editor, The Moscow Times: oped@imedia.ru
For Personal and Academic Use Only.
|
|
back
