EDITORIAL: Re: Jayson Blair and Walter Duranty (05/18/03)

EDITORIAL

Re: Jayson Blair and Walter Duranty

"Times Editor Details Steps to Prevent a Recurrence of Fraud" was the headline on a news story in the May 13 issue of The New York Times concerning the case of a promising young reporter, Jayson Blair, who turned out to be better at writing fiction than fact and who thought nothing of using someone else's work to further his own career. He was, in short, a fraud. Tina Kelley reported in the story that Executive Editor Howell Raines "announced that a committee would be formed to address what went wrong" and that top editors would consider what "repairs" must be made to the paper's modus operandi. The story also quoted an e-mail message to staffers of the paper from Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Mr. Raines and Managing Editor Gerald M. Boyd: "We are resolved to do all that we can to learn from this tragedy and prevent any similar instances of journalistic fraud in the future."

That piece followed a May 11 front-page story that jumped to pages 24 through 27, which recounted the "chain of falsifications and plagiarism" that appeared in at least 37 articles by Mr. Blair. The story called the Blair case "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper," and Mr. Sulzberger referred to it as "a huge black eye" and "an abrogation of the trust between a newspaper and its readers." That same issue contained an Editor's Note on page 3 which explained that The Times had organized a weeklong investigation into the episode "in the belief that the appropriate corrective for flawed journalism is better journalism - accurate journalism." The note also asked readers and news sources who know of "defects" in other articles to send e-mail to The Times at retrace@nytimes.com. The item ended with an apology to readers, subjects of news stories, those "whose work was purloined" and "to all conscientious journalists whose professional trust has been betrayed by this episode."

We cite all of the foregoing for the benefit of our readers beyond the reach of The New York Times and in order to bring up a "disconnect" in the Times' deportment. Despite the Times' profuse apologies, its pronouncements about having nothing to hide, as well as its fine words about preventing such fraud from recurring in the future and conducting a complete inquiry to regain the trust of its readers, we have even more questions about the standards at The New York Times.

What about the proven fraud committed in the past? What about the much more serious "systematic fraud" (to use a phrase from The Times' news story about Mr. Blair) committed by one of the stars of The Times, Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty? The low point represented by the actions of Jayson Blair, and the inaction of his editors, pales in comparison to that perpetrated by Duranty, and the Times' refusal to voluntarily relinquish his ill-gotten prize for correspondence.

Duranty, after all, concealed an artificially created famine that killed millions. What's more, he lied in print while in private telling others that millions were dying due to Stalin's famine. And, he slandered fellow journalists, those who did tell the truth about what really was happening in the USSR. He had no journalistic integrity, no ethical concerns whatsoever. He, like Jayson Blair, was a careerist. Duranty's lies about Stalin's USSR and his role as an apologist for that regime guaranteed him access to the powerful and, as a result, fame.

The New York Times should apply the mechanisms used in the Blair case to come clean about Walter Duranty, admit that it was complicit in covering up a major genocide of the 20th century, renounce its Moscow correspondent's reporting at the time of the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 - and return Duranty's defiled Pulitzer. Then, and only then, could we begin to once again trust this newspaper of record whose slogan remains: "All the news that's fit to print."

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