EDITORIAL: A Pulitzer-winning offense (04/18/99)

EDITORIAL

A Pulitzer-winning offense

In "Bloopers of the Century," an article about "blunders, hoaxes, goofs, flubs, boo-boos, screw-ups, fakes" published in the January-February issue of Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), John Leo, a syndicated columnist and a contributing editor of U.S. News & World Report, writes that the worst reportorial sins "always involve getting it wrong on purpose." That is his lead-in to one particularly egregious example: coverage of the USSR by The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, "perhaps the only Pulitzer winner that The Paper of Record would fervently like to forget."

Mr. Leo is referring, of course, to Duranty's role in concealing the Great Famine of 1932-1933. The article reports: "When Stalin engineered massive famine in the [sic] Ukraine to help break resistance to Soviet control, Duranty told Times readers that 'any report of a famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.' In 1933, at the height of the famine, he wrote of abundant grain, plump babies, fat calves, and 'village markets flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter at prices far lower than in Moscow.' He added that 'a child can see this is not famine but abundance.' "

Furthermore, Mr. Leo emphasizes: "In fact, the death toll was enormous and Duranty knew it. He told colleagues privately it was in the range of 10 million. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge said Duranty was 'the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met.' But the Pulitzer committee praised Duranty's reports for their 'scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and clarity.' ..."

"Eventually, Duranty's Soviet coverage provoked debate among his editors and readers. To its credit, The Times editorial page challenged his accounts. But in the genteel journalistic world of that era, his reporting was never odious enough to get him recalled or fired." And the clincher, as pointed out in CJR: "The embarrassing Pulitzer has never been withdrawn or returned."

This week, as the major news media reported on the winners of this year's Pulitzer Prizes, our thoughts turned, once again, to Duranty's ill-gotten prize. In previous years, when The Times won a new Pulitzer it had trotted out all its Pulitzer winners, from the year 1918 on, as a reminder of its distinguished record through the decades. For Ukrainians, seeing Walter Duranty's name on that list was akin to rubbing salt into a wound. But no longer does The Times boast about Duranty ...

A major turnaround came on June 24, 1990, when Karl A. Meyer of The Times, in a feature on its editorial page called "The Editorial Notebook," wrote about the infamous Moscow correspondent and acknowledged that what Duranty wrote from his post constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." (The item also noted that Duranty's misdeeds are detailed in a new book, "Stalin's Apologist" by S.J. Taylor. A review of that biography appeared in the very same issue in The New York Times Book Review.)

Nonetheless, more than six decades after Stalin's artificially created Famine killed between 7 million and 10 million people, The Times has not relinquished Duranty's Pulitzer Prize. Nor has the Pulitzer committee done the right thing.

Isn't it clear that, in order to achieve just a measure of justice, there must be no Pulitzer Prize associated with Walter Duranty's name?

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