FACES AND PLACES: Safer to receive Duranty "award" (03/12/95)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Safer to receive Duranty "award"

After much debate, the board of directors of the Ukrainian American Justice Committee (UAJC) has reached a momentous decision. The 1994 "Walter Duranty Award for Journalistic Dissimulation" has been conferred upon Morley Safer, who reported "The Ugly Face of Freedom," the "60 Minutes" segment aired by CBS-TV on October 23, 1994.

"It was not a hard choice," confessed Walter Tun, UAJC executive director. "Of course there were many nominees. But after Mr. Safer's Ukrainophobic performance before some 17.5 million households in October, it was no contest."

The award will be presented annually by UAJC to a Western journalist who best exemplifies the journalistic defects demonstrated by Walter Duranty, the English-born Moscow correspondent of The New York Times who in l932 and 1933 denied the existence of a famine in Ukraine. Those infirmities, according to UAJC Co-Chair Roman Golash, include reporting marked by "deceit, prevarication, duplicity, fraud, racism or, of course, dissimulation."

In March 1932, after reports of a famine in Ukraine had been circulated in the West, Mr. Duranty apprised The New York Times that "there [was] no famine anywhere although partial crop failures [occurred] in some regions."

On November 25, 1932, Mr. Duranty reported that "there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."

On March 31, 1933, his story in the Times read: "There is a serious food shortage throughout the country, with occasional cases of well-managed state or collective farms. The big cities and the army are adequately supplied with food. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition... These conditions are bad, but there is no famine."

Did Mr. Duranty know the truth? In conversations with other Moscow correspondents he admitted there was a famine in Ukraine and that it had killed some 7 million people.

"But they're only Russians," he told his compatriots.

Following his tour of Ukraine at the time of the 1932-1933 famine, Mr. Duranty paid a visit to the British Chancery in Moscow. William Strang, the charge d'affaires, summarized his conversation with the American correspondent for Sir John Simon, the foreign secretary.

Mr. Duranty told the diplomat that he estimated the population of Ukraine had decreased some 4-5 million. "Mr. Duranty," the report read, "thinks it 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."

Walter Duranty was well rewarded for his mendacity. He was permitted an interview with Joseph Stalin and he accompanied Maxim Litvinov to the United States when the Soviet diplomat arrived to discuss America's pending recognition of the USSR.

A darling of the American Left, Mr. Duranty received the Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting and was lauded by the Nation for his "enlightening, dispassionate, and readable dispatches from a great nation in the making..."

Like Mr. Duranty, Morley Safer is not a native American. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, to Jewish parents. He came to the United States in 1964 after graduating from the University of Western Ontario and a stint with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Mr. Safer has also received many prestigious awards for his reporting. Included are four Emmy awards in 1981, three Emmy awards in 1985, and the George Foster Peabody award.

The "60 Minutes" report by Mr. Safer meets all of the criteria set forth by the UAJC for consideration of the Duranty Award.

Given the manner in which Mr. Safer reported on Ukraine, for example, suggesting that Ukrainians are "genetically anti-Semitic," it is difficult not to conclude that the segment was journalistically irresponsible and thus a disservice to the public. Given the creative editing employed in the segment (e.g., taking the words of Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich out of context), it is impossible not to conclude that Mr. Safer's report was deceitful and duplicitous.

The Duranty Award will be presented to Mr. Safer or his representative on Sunday, April 9, at Ss. Volodymyr Ukrainian Catholic Church Hall in Chicago at noon. The ceremony is open to the public.

The main speaker at the Chicago event will be Joe Goulden, director of media analysis for Accuracy in Media, the national press watchdog group.

A native of Texas, Mr. Goulden has enjoyed careers as a newsman, a best-selling non-fiction author and as a media critic.

At the University of Texas he became managing editor of the Daily Texan and upon graduation worked as a reporter for the Dallas News. He went to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1961, first as an investigative reporter and then as Washington bureau chief. During his tenure in Washington he covered the White House and national security affairs.

Mr. Goulden became a full-time writer in 1968. Among his 18 published books are "The Superlawyers," a national bestseller for five months; "The Best Years, America 1945-1950," a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month-Club; and "Korea: The Untold Story of the War." He is presently completing a biography of President Woodrow Wilson.

The title of Mr. Goulden's presentation on April 9 is "Duranty Lives."

Participants at the presentation ceremony will be able to purchase copies of the latest UAJC publication titled "Scourging of a Nation: CBS and the Defamation of Ukraine," Marco Carynnyk's "Making the News Fit to Print: Walter Duranty, The New York Times and the Ukrainian Famine of 1933," and S.J. Taylor's "Stalin's Apologist, Walter Duranty: The New York Times' Man in Moscow."

Although Mr. Safer has been informed of the award ceremony he has not yet replied.

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Readers of this column may wish to send a congratulatory letter to Morley Safer, c/o CBS News "60 Minutes", 555 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

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