News media worldwide report on drive to revoke Duranty's Pulitzer

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - The campaign to revoke Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize received worldwide publicity in the past two weeks with the publication of news stories and broadcast reports on The Pulitzer Prize Board's announcement that it had begun a review of the 1932 award. (The story was first reported in The Ukrainian Weekly on May 25.)

United Press International on June 2 carried a commentary by its senior news analyst Martin Sieff titled "Shame of Duranty's Pulitzer."

"As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully - and knowingly - false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine," wrote Mr. Sieff.

He went on to cite The Weekly's Editor Andrew Nynka as reporting that the Pulitzer Prize board had begun an "appropriate and serious review" of the 1932 award given to Duranty. UPI also cited The Weekly's report that the "confidential review by the 18-member Pulitzer Prize board is intended to seriously consider all relevant information regarding Mr. Duranty's award."

Mr. Sieff added: "The utter falsehood of Duranty's claims that there was no famine at all in the [sic] Ukraine - a whopping lie that was credulously swallowed unconditionally by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and many others - has been documented and common knowledge for decades. But neither the Times nor the Pulitzer board ever before steeled themselves to launch such a ponderous, unprecedented - and potentially immensely embarrassing - procedure. Indeed, Gissler told The Ukrainian Weekly that there are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize."

The analyst then proceeded to lay out the facts about the Famine of 1932-1933, which he described as "the largest single act of genocide in European history."

"Yet the mainstream Western media was virtually blind to what was going on," Mr. Sieff continued. "And in the United States, serious newspapers across the nation took their lead from the then-revered and utterly trusted Duranty. As Richard Pipes, a leading U.S. authority on Soviet history, noted, 'It has been said that no man has done more to paint in the United States a favorable image of the Soviet Union at a time when it was suffering under the most savage tyranny known to man.' "

The UPI analyst, a specialist in international affairs, who has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, concluded his commentary with the following:

"In his own lifetime - he lived to the age of 73, though he died broke and forgotten - Duranty was never called to account. Indeed, as [Malcolm] Muggeridge [correspondent for the Manchester Guardian who, defying Soviet authorities, traveled to Ukraine and reported on the Famine] also noted, 'He came to be accepted as the great Russian expert in America, and played a major part in shaping President Roosevelt's policies' towards the Soviet Union.

"The Pulitzer Prize board's re-evaluation of Duranty's award therefore comes late in the day, to put it mildly, but it is still a welcome, indeed necessary gesture towards American journalistic integrity and to the hecatombs of dead whose cries were hushed."

Mr Sieff's commentary was picked up by other news media, among them The Washington Times online edition.

Soon after the UPI commentary appeared, Fox News Channel contacted The Ukrainian Weekly to learn more about the Famine and the campaign to strip Duranty of his Pulitzer. Correspondent Rick Leventhal visited The Weekly's editorial offices on June 4, speaking with Editor-in-Chief Roma Hadzewycz and Mr. Nynka, and filming an interview with Ms. Hadzewycz. Fox also interviewed Askold Lozynskyj, president of the Ukrainian World Congress. A brief report on the campaign aired on the Fox network on June 10.

The Associated Press reports

The Associated Press on June 10 disseminated a news story headlined "Pulitzer probes Times writer's 1932 award." Written by Larry McShane, the report noted that "A Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to a New York Times correspondent is under review and could be revoked because of complaints that he deliberately ignored the forced famine in the [sic] Ukraine that killed millions. The review of Walter Duranty's work was launched in April by a Pulitzer subcommittee. No Pulitzer has ever been revoked in the 86 years that the prize has been awarded."

Mr. McShane cited the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and Ukrainians worldwide who are participating in a campaign seeking the withdrawal of Duranty's award. He cited UCCA President Michael Sawkiw Jr. for information that more than 15,000 postcards and thousands more letters and e-mails were sent to the Pulitzer Board. "Exactly like Jayson Blair, the heart of all this is journalistic integrity and ethics," Mr. Sawkiw told the AP, referring to the Times reporter who fabricated and plagiarized numerous stories that appeared in that newspaper.

"Like any significant complaint, we take them seriously," Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Board, told the AP. "They are under review by a board subcommittee, and all aspects and ramifications will be considered."

The news service also reported: "The Times has also distanced itself from Duranty's work. The reporter's 1932 Pulitzer is displayed with this caveat: 'Other writers in The Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.' "

The same story quoted Toby Usnik, director of public relations at The Times, as saying: "The Times has reported often and thoroughly on the defects in Duranty's journalism as viewed through the lens of later events."

The AP also reported that the Pulitzer Board had previously considered the Duranty case and that "a similar probe in 1990 ended with a decision to let the Pulitzer stand."

The Associated Press story appeared in a range of publications around the globe, from The New York Times (which did not run its own story, but only the AP's) and Newsday, based on Long Island, N.Y., to the Melbourne Age in Australia and The Straits Times, which covers the Pacific region and is the most widely read newspaper in Singapore. It was also cited in local newspapers, many information websites and online publications.

National Review commentary

The National Review Online of May 7 carried an article by Andrew Stuttaford headlined "Prize Specimen: The campaign to revoke Walter Duranty's Pulitzer."

Mr. Stuttaford, who is contributing editor for National Review Online, wrote that Duranty "in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been 'serious food shortages' in the [sic] Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that 'there [was] no actual starvation.' There had been no 'deaths from starvation,' he soothed, merely 'widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.' So that was all right then."

But Duranty "was keeping count," Mr. Stuttaford writes. "In the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that 10 million had died. 'The Ukraine,' he said, 'had been bled white,' remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as 'a sheer absurdity,' remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the [sic] Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how 'the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years.' As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the [sic] Ukraine in April that year), he 'had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found.' "

"Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a 'final' solution," the editor wrote.

"Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall," he continued. "Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception. ..."

Mr. Stuttaford concluded with a reference to The Washington Post correspondent who wrote a heart-wrenching account of an 8-year-old junkie, winning a Pulitzer - which the Post returned after learning that the story, and the boy named Jimmy, were fabrications:

"Duranty's 'Stalin' was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's 'Jimmy' and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

"And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to The New York Times to insist that it does so."

Financial Times comments

The Financial Times of June 11, in its op-ed section called "Observer," printed the following brief item headlined "Tough Times":

"The New York Times can't catch a break these days. Now a group is petitioning for the revocation of a Pulitzer Prize won by its reporter Walter Duranty - in 1932. And the Pulitzer board is considering the issue, says The New York Sun. Duranty won a Pulitzer for stories he filed from Ukraine. And in the 70th anniversary year of the Ukrainian Famine, several Ukrainian-American groups are campaigning to have it revoked on the grounds that Duranty's sympathy for Joseph Stalin meant he ignored millions of deaths.

"Even though it is accepted that Duranty was sympathetic to Stalin, this latest scandal - a historical one at that - is enough to turn the Gray Lady, well, gray."

Other media reports

Reports were carried also by The Globe and Mail, which published a news story by Victor Malarek on May 2; the Agence France Presse news service; the British-based London Daily Telegraph, Guardian and The Observer (an online daily newspaper); The New York Sun, which featured the story on the front page of its June 10 edition; the websites of CBS News and Fox News Channel; and several radio stations, including the New York news station WCBS.

The New York Daily News on June 11 published a short news story by business writer Paul D. Colford, who reported that "Thousands of letters, e-mails and preprinted postcards have been sent to the Pulitzer Board in a campaign begun early this year by Ukrainian groups in the U.S. and abroad."

"I'm very happy with the decision [of the Pulitzer Board to review Duranty's prize,]" Myron Kuropas of DeKalb, Ill., who was identified as a retired education and a member of the Ukrainian National Association, told Mr. Colford. "They should have done this years and years ago," Dr. Kuropas added.

Dr. Kuropas - who participated in the postcard campaign aimed at revoking Duranty's Pulitzer by distributing 1,000 of the 30,000 cards that were printed before May and subsequently mailed from the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, including Ukraine - was previously quoted in his local newspaper, the Daily Chronicle of DeKalb county in Illinois. He told staff writer Dan Campana that a U.S. congressional commission published its findings in 1988 that "Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933." Dr. Kuropas also explained to the Chronicle that the Soviets had denied the Famine for decades and only in 1990 acknowledged that it had indeed occurred.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, who initiated the postcard campaign, told the Illinois newspaper that the Pulitzer committee is "fully aware of the facts." He added: "Why wouldn't they revoke his [Duranty's] Pulitzer Prize? What harm does it do?"

The Duranty case also received much play on a variety of websites and online forums, including the Internet newspaper WorldNetDaily.com, which used mostly the information contained in the above-mentioned Associated Press report; and townhall.com, which published a commentary by Marvin Olasky, editor of World (www.worldmag.com).

- compiled by Roma Hadzewycz

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, June 15, 2003, No. 24, Vol. LXXI

| Home Page |