EDITORIAL: The Famine and The Times revisited (11/10/02)

EDITORIAL

The Famine and The Times revisited

We've written before in this space about the ignominious reporting of Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of The New York Times during the period of the Great Famine of 1932-1933, and the ignoble response decades later by the newspaper's publishers and editors to revelations that their correspondent's reporting was, in effect, part of the Soviet cover-up of this genocide. (We refer our readers especially to "The Famine and The Times," November 25, 2001.)

What brings us to do so again? A recently released book titled "Written into History." Just released in paperback, the book contains Pulitzer Prize reporting of the 20th century from The New York Times. Certainly we had to take a look at how the volume deals with Duranty, who won the Pulitzer in 1932 for his "dispassionate interpretive reporting" from the USSR, filing news reports that denied the Famine, while privately telling British intelligence that he believed over 10 million had died.

First we turned to the listing of the Pulitzer winners of The New York Times. Sure enough, Duranty was still there, but with the parenthetical notation: "Other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage." It is the same notation that appears after an asterisk under the photograph of Duranty that is among the photos of Pulitzer winners which line a corridor at The Times.

Next we looked at the chapter called "Around the Globe," which notes that the first individual foreign correspondent from The Times to win the Pulitzer was Duranty and that his prize "has come under a cloud." Duranty's reporting, the book explains, "ignored the reality of Stalin's mass murder"; it goes on to cite a memorandum written in 1932 by George F. Kennan, then a U.S. foreign service officer in Riga, Latvia, which says that in the USSR "15 to 20 million people have been killed in military operations, exiled to prison camps, forced [to] emigrate or deprived of all civic rights for political reasons ..." Amazingly, there is not a word about the Famine-Genocide.

In the introduction to the book, Anthony Lewis, himself a two-time winner of the Pulitzer, writes the following: "In a process run by human beings, there are always going to be decisions that in hindsight look like mistakes. The worst in Pulitzer history was the award of a prize in 1981 to Janet Cooke of the Washington Post for stories on how a small boy in the inner city of Washington, D.C., was caught up in the drug trade. Not long after the prize announcement the story unraveled; Ms. Cooke admitted that she had invented the small boy. She disappeared from the Post and journalism, and the prize was returned. The Times, too, has a blot on its Pulitzer record. In 1932 its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, won for international reporting. But his work increasingly came to be seen as slanted toward the Soviet regime."

Mr. Lewis presents an excellent parallel. But, Ms. Cooke's prize was returned. Why not Duranty's? In 1986 Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger had said in response to pressure to give up the Pulitzer: "... it is not a prize The Times can take back." But the Times can do the honorable thing and relinquish Duranty's ill-gotten award. The deaths of millions deserve more than an asterisk in The New York Times pantheon of Pulitzer winners.

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