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By John Berlau, Writer, Insight On The News magazine
Washington Times Corp., Washington, D.C., Monday, July 7, 2003
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Reeling from a scandal involving alleged plagiarism and false reporting from
former star reporter Jayson Blair, the New York Times is relying heavily on
its carefully cultivated reputation for decades of integrity and objectivity
in reporting. Even though its two top editors resigned in disgrace, Times
publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is telling shareholders and readers
that this is a minor blemish for a newspaper that historically has held to
the "highest standards of integrity and journalism."
With the famously liberal paper citing its history to try to redeem its
image, critics are taking the opportunity to hold the Times accountable for
the journalistic crimes of its star foreign correspondent of 70 years ago.
They cite the cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty of mass
murders and other atrocities ordered by Josef Stalin in the former Soviet
Union. Despite evidence even the Times does not dispute which shows Duranty
knew well that millions were being starved to death at the very time he used
the newspaper to deny Stalin's forced Ukrainian famine, the Times has
refused to return the prize he won in 1932 for his Soviet reporting. In fact
it still displays Duranty's work in an in-house exhibit honoring the paper's
Pulitzer Prize winners.
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Duranty intentionally misreported that
there was no forced famine in the Ukraine when, in fact, millions were dying
as a result of Stalin's starvation policy
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"The Jayson Blair incident really put the Times out there in terms of
journalistic integrity of one of its correspondents, and we're looking at
this as an inroad into the New York Times to speak about the atrocities
Walter Duranty knew about but unfortunately did not write about," says
Michael Sawkiw Jr., president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of
America, which has led the drive to convince the Times to return the award
and persuade the Pulitzer Prize board to revoke it. "When it comes to
journalistic integrity and ethics," Sawkiw says, "anything that is written
that undermines those ideals should be categorically denounced, and any
prize or honor associated with publication of the offender should be given
back."
In the last few months, the Pulitzer board has received thousands of
postcards, letters and e-mails from Ukrainian-Americans and others concerned
about failure of the Times to come to grips with Duranty's misreporting. The
board has responded by forming a special subcommittee to review whether the
prize awarded to Duranty should be revoked. "All aspects and ramifications
will be considered," said Pulitzer Prizes administrator Sig Gissler in a
June statement.
While Gissler says the board never before has revoked a Pulitzer Prize,
there is a precedent for one being returned. In 1981, Janet Cooke of the
Washington Post was awarded a Pulitzer for her vivid story of an 8-year-old,
inner-city, crack addict called "Jimmy." But it later turned out that Jimmy
existed only in Cooke's imagination. The Post came clean and returned the
Pulitzer.
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The Times, however, says it already has done enough penance for the
intentional misreporting. It claims that along with the exhibit of Duranty's
Pulitzer Prize in its hallway display, there is a caveat that states, "Other
writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage." An
e-mail sent to Insight by Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate
communications at the New York Times Co., explains: "The Times has not seen
merit in trying to undo history" by returning the Pulitzer. The e-mail
insists: "The Times has reported often and thoroughly on the defects in
Duranty's journalism, as viewed through the lens of later events."
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But Duranty's reporting was not just "defective" when "viewed through the
lens of later events." It was in fact fraudulent and was contradicted by
many of his contemporaries in the 1930s. Yet it wasn't until the late 1980s,
as the Soviet Union was imploding, that the Times was in the least critical
of Duranty's reports, as many scholars of the former Soviet Union note. They
also question the Times' sincerity in the matter of Duranty's reporting,
arguing that even today a strain of anti-anticommunism pervades the paper's
editorial page and much of its news reporting. They wonder to what extent
this explains why the Times has been reluctant to return the Pulitzer.
"I've written a few columns about the Times' love affair with communism, and
I'm being somewhat sarcastic," says Ronald Radosh, a historian whose works
concluding that the Rosenbergs and other suspects were indeed Soviet agents
were bashed by the Times through the years but have been vindicated by the
opening of the Soviet historical archives. "The Times constantly over the
years makes unadulterated heroes of the victims of the blacklist. In their
obituaries they always present communists in a positive light. The Times
seems to have lost any critical faculty when writing about the issue of
communism. They would never publish glowing obituaries for dead Nazis and
fascists as they do for dead communists." A recent Times obituary of
novelist Howard Fast, for example, insisted that he was a victim of the
1950s blacklist without also noting that at the time he was an ardent
Stalinist. He was a member of the Communist Party.
The newspaper makes much of the fact that in 1986 it gave a largely
favorable review to Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, which depicted
the horrors of the Stalin-engineered Ukrainian famine that killed more than
7 million people in the 1930s and criticized Duranty's reporting for
covering it up in the United States. Citing Duranty, Times reviewer Craig
Whitney euphemized that "poor performance by some Western correspondents
helped Stalin spread the lie."
Yet, as Conquest notes in his book, just three years earlier the 1983 annual
report of the New York Times Co. listed, along with other honors of which
the Times is proud, Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize for "dispassionate,
interpretive reporting of the news from Russia." Conquest, himself a
Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, also points out that many other
newspapers and journalists got the story right at the time. "In spite of
everything, full or adequate reports appeared in the [British papers] the
Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph; [the French papers] Le Matin
and Le Figaro; [the Swiss papers] the Neue Zuericher Zeitung and the Gazette
de Lausanne; La Stampa in Italy, the Reichpost in Austria and scores of
other Western papers," he writes. "In the United States, wide-circulation
newspapers printed very full firsthand accounts by Ukrainian-American and
other visitors (though these were discounted as, often, appearing in
'right-wing' journals); and the Christian Science Monitor, the New York
Herald Tribune (and the New York Jewish Forwaerts) gave broad coverage." The
now-defunct Chicago American even ran pictures of the pale, skeletal
Ukrainian children and the fields littered with corpses.
And Duranty's reporting was filled with more than just "defects," the phrase
in the Times' 2003 apologies. It contained information that, by several
accounts, he knew to be false. The Soviets did keep tight control over
foreign journalists, but Duranty offered Stalin his eager cooperation. In
1933, at the height of the famine, Duranty wrote that "village markets
[were] flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter. ... A
child can see this is not famine but abundance." Reports such as these were
crucial, historians say, in the decision of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
to grant the Soviet Union diplomatic recognition in 1933. But a British
Embassy dispatch from 1933, reported in Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow and
then in S.J. Taylor's definitive 1990 Duranty biography, Stalin's Apologist,
quotes Duranty as admitting to British Embassy officials in Moscow that "the
Ukraine had been bled white [and] the peasants were 'double-crossed' by the
government." In his words, it was "quite possible that as many as 10 million
people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet
Union during the past year."
Little wonder Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the courageous left-wing
journalists who reported the truth about the famine and who later became a
famous author, editor, humorist and playwright, called Duranty "the greatest
liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism."
Yet, even half-a-century later, Duranty's newspaper still was not ready to
expose the nature of Stalin's big lie. In the 1986 book review the Times
sent Insight conceding that, yes, there was a famine because of Stalin's
collective agriculture policies, and maybe Duranty actively covered it up,
the reviewer still argued against the view of Conquest and almost every
other professional historian that Stalin deliberately was trying to kill off
the Ukraine's small farmers. "Far more debatable is the thesis that the
famine was specifically aimed as an instrument of genocide against the
Ukraine," reviewer Whitney wrote, criticizing Conquest for tangential use of
a book published by Ukrainian emigrés as a source.
In 1988 the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Ukraine Famine would
vindicate Conquest, using the word "genocide" (which Conquest actually did
not use, calling it a "terror famine") to describe the policy of
deliberately killing off the Ukrainian kulaks. A joint resolution from both
houses of the U.S. Congress ratified the commission's conclusion, and in
2003 a House bill to establish a memorial to the victims referred to the
deliberate starvation as "the famine-genocide in the Ukraine." This bill was
cosponsored, among others, by Democratic Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Marcy
Kaptur of Ohio, and Nita Lowey of New York - all devoutly on the political
left. Evidence that Stalin's collectivization policies were intended to wipe
out all the Ukraine's traditional small farmers includes the facts that the
Soviet government confiscated nearly all food from a bumper Ukrainian crop,
turned down aid from international relief organizations and refused to let
the Ukrainian peasants flee to obtain food.
"The Ukrainians were nationally conscious, and they understood what freedom
means," Sawkiw explains. "For them to give up their land for this
collectivization campaign meant that they had to give up a part of
themselves, meant that they were giving up a part of their being as a
nation. So they were very nationally conscious, and that's why Stalin
specifically targeted the [Ukrainian] peasants" to be starved to death.
Ironically, even as the Times continues to downplay the horrors of the
Ukrainian famine in which so many millions were killed, its representatives
argue that it doesn't matter because Duranty's Pulitzer was awarded for
stories published in 1931, before they say the famine was noticeable.
"Duranty's prize was given for a specific set of stories in 1931, not in
1932 or 1933 when the famine in Ukraine struck with full force," the Times
e-mail states. In letters and statements, Pulitzer administrator Gissler has
taken a similar line. Yet in a Times column the paper sent with the e-mail,
author Karl E. Meyer states, "The biggest Duranty lapse was his indifference
to the catastrophic famine in 1930-31 [italics added]." The evidence in
Stalin's Apologist, published by the prestigious Oxford University Press,
and other authoritative accounts, shows Duranty toed the communist line from
the moment the Times assigned him to the Soviet Union in 1921. In one of his
first stories for that year, about the infamous New Economic Policy to get
the West to build the communist economy, Duranty gushed that "[Vladimir]
Lenin has thrown communism overboard ... abandoning state ownership, with
the exception of a definite number of great industries of national
importance - such as were controlled by the state in France, England and
Germany during the war [World War I]."
As Harvard historian Richard Pipes wrote in his book Russia Under the
Bolshevik Regime, Duranty's stories stressing "Lenin's alleged adoption of
Western economic models ... was very important for Moscow to convey at a
time when it actively sought foreign credits."
An early supporter of Stalin, Duranty wrote for the Times until 1941 and
never wavered in his defense of the Soviet dictator, even defending
horrendous atrocities such as the completely transparent show trials. A
short, bald Englishman with a wooden leg, Duranty appears to have been
handsomely rewarded by the Soviets for his loyalty. Taylor reports that his
four-room Moscow apartment was stocked with vodka and caviar, and that he
employed a chauffeur, a maid and a cook who became his mistress.
In 1953, after the death of Stalin, Duranty came briefly out of retirement
to write a page-one obituary for the Orlando Morning Sentinel, in which he
hailed Stalin for "lift[ing] himself and [his followers] to such heights of
strength and influence as few mortals have ever known." His health declined
steadily, and four years later he died from an internal hemorrhage
complicated by pulmonary emphysema at the age of 73. "It was as if, with
Stalin's death, Walter Duranty had nothing left to say," Taylor wrote.
And Sawkiw points to new evidence of a formal agreement that Duranty, and
possibly the Times itself, had with the Soviet Union concerning news
coverage. In his new book, U.S. Intelligence Perceptions of Soviet Power
1921-46, historian Leonard Leshuk, citing State Department memos, writes,
"In June 1931, Duranty admitted to A.W. Kleiforth of the U.S. Embassy in
Berlin that, 'in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet
authorities,' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of
the Soviet regime and not his own." Sawkiw sees this as the smoking gun.
"This proves his errors were errors of commission," the Ukraine scholar
says. None of the articles on Duranty that the Times sent to Insight to make
its case so much as noted this new evidence.
Radosh and other critics say that while the Times argues it is not returning
the prize because it does not want to "undo history," the paper in fact is
trying to cover up its own history of helping launch communist regimes that
systematically oppress their people. Times correspondent Herbert Matthews
was instrumental in Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba through dispatches
calling the future communist dictator "the rebel leader of Cuba's youth" and
asserting that "thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel
Castro." As former Times reporter John Corry recalled in his memoirs, My
Times, "Castro's people in Havana obtained thousands of reprints of
Matthews' articles and mailed them all over Havana. Perfectly ordinary
Cubans who had not thought about Castro before read that he was now their
new leader. ... [T]he White House and State Department listened."
When Corry wrote an article in which communists looked bad, he incurred the
wrath of editors and prestige reporters. Corry recalls a 6,500-word piece he
wrote in 1982 exposing a disinformation campaign launched by the communist
government in Warsaw that claimed Polish emigré novelist Jerzy Kosinski was
a CIA agent and didn't write his own books. The article produced angry
reactions from veteran Times reporters David Halberstam and Harrison
Salisbury. "How could you?!" Corry recalls Halberstam yelling at him.
When it comes to protecting the left the Times apparently has a double
standard. For instance, it recently ran an editorial-page explanation
backing away from a fine series of stories by Jeff Gerth and James Risen
alleging that Los Alamos nuclear-lab employee Wen Ho Lee might be a Chinese
spy, even though Lee pleaded guilty to some of the related charges. But it
has yet to publish an explanation of Matthews' stories lionizing and
promoting Castro.
Even today, this enormously powerful U.S. newspaper continues to harp on
McCarthyism without holding American communists accountable for their active
infiltration of U.S. institutions and support for brutal regimes, Radosh
says. He recounts an incident in 1991 when, he says, he was commissioned to
write a review of Guilty by Suspicion, a movie about the Hollywood blacklist
of communists in the 1950s. Radosh was critical of the film, saying it did
not reveal that many of those blacklisted were ardent supporters of Stalin.
The Times spiked his review but ran an article by Victor Navasky of the
far-left Nation magazine attacking Radosh's unpublished piece. "They didn't
even run the two pieces side by side," says Radosh, whose piece eventually
ran in the conservative American Spectator. (Although a letter from Radosh
protesting Navasky's use of his words was published in the Times, Mathis
tells Insight that "None of the editors I discussed this with had a
recollection of the events you described.")
More recently the Times ran an editorial claiming that historians who were
writing about the now-definitive linking of the American Communist Party to
the Soviet Union were trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Sen. Joseph
McCarthy (R-Wis.). "We were not trying rehabilitate McCarthy," Radosh says.
"We were trying to separate McCarthyism from anticommunism and show the
validity of anticommunism, and they, of course, totally mixed the two
together and attacked us without us having a say in the matter."
In her new best-selling book, Treason, conservative Ann Coulter notes that
when the Venona Project was declassified and intercepted, Soviet cables were
seen to prove that many long-suspected government officials such as Alger
Hiss were indeed Soviet spies as charged. She found through a database
search that not one article on Venona ever appeared on the front page or
editorial page of the New York Times, and only 13 articles in the Times
since the 1995 revelation have so much as discussed Venona.
Indeed, on the 50th anniversary of the Rosenbergs' execution this June, the
Times ran an editorial saying they were not "as guilty as the government
alleged," despite Venona and tons of evidence to the contrary. "They still
want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were well-meaning
and what they did wasn't bad," Radosh says. "In truth, Julius [Rosenberg's]
KGB control [officer] said he was one of the most effective Soviet spies. I
thought it was an outrage."
Radosh doesn't expect the Times' blind spot for communism to change
overnight, but he says at the very least it ought to try to right historical
wrong by returning Duranty's infamous Pulitzer. "Ostensibly, prizes like the
Pulitzer are given for solid, serious journalism that has proven
responsible," he says. "What Duranty did is so far more dangerous and
scurrilous than what Janet Cooke did that it's crazy to say they shouldn't
give back the Pulitzer Prize."
Joseph Goulden, author of a book on the New York Times, crusaded for years
in the 1980s and 1990s as director of media analysis for the journalistic
watchdog group Accuracy in Media to get the paper to return the Duranty
Pulitzer. Now, with the Blair scandal, he says, critical mass finally may be
building. "It's sitting there at the Times stinking like rotting garbage,"
Goulden tells Insight. And if they don't give it back, Radosh says, the New
York Times should at least add another caveat to its display. "What they
should say is that the Times did not give back this Pulitzer, because the
Times loves getting Pulitzers, even though Duranty was a propagandist for
Stalin and everything he wrote was a lie."
By John Berlau, Writer, Insight On The News magazine, July 7, 2003
jberlau@insightmag.com, Washington Times Corp., Washington, D.C.
http://www.insightmag.com/news/446194.html
Insight On The News is a national biweekly news magazine. It is
a sister publication to the Washington Times in Washington, D.C.
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