Story of Duranty's Pulitzer continues to receive international exposure

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - From North America to Russia, from India to Argentina, in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, and online in various publications and discussion groups, the case of Walter Duranty continues to be in the headlines.

The Chicago Tribune of June 25, published a story by Senior Correspondent Charles Leroux, who reported that "In 1932, the Pulitzer Prize went to a foreign correspondent who concealed a famine and the deaths of millions. Ukrainians want that prize revoked."

Headlined "Bearing witness," the story focuses on one survivor of the Great Famine, Anatole Kolomayets of Chicago, and his reaction to the Duranty debacle. "He does not belong with the honest men. It [awarding the prize to Duranty] was shameful," Mr. Kolomayets told the Tribune.

Mr. Leroux wrote that "Duranty had made a deal with what turned out to be the devil. In 1929, an exclusive interview with Stalin secured him tremendous influence in his profession. ... In exchange for continued precious access to the Kremlin, he agreed to report favorably on Stalin's plan to raise industrial and agricultural productivity and the standard of living for citizens of the USSR."

During the worst of the famine, he noted, "Duranty reported that 'village markets [were] flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk and butter. ... A child can see this is not famine but abundance.' "

Mr. Kolomayets, whose family lived in eastern Ukraine, told the Tribune that it was actually much different: "I remember a boiled egg - just one. It was at Christmas." The article then went on to tell more about the life of Mr. Kolomayets and his relatives at the time of the famine.

Mr. Leroux also focused on other correspondents who, unlike Duranty, did report what was happening in Ukraine. "Reporters other than Duranty - principally Welsh journalist Gareth Jones and The Guardian's [Malcolm] Muggeridge - described scenes of great suffering. One such report told of grain stores (the Soviets exported grain to the West during the famine) guarded by armed Russian troops while Ukrainians died of starvation nearby."

The reporter also brought up the issue of Duranty's libel of other journalists: "... in an August 1933 New York Times story [he] called Muggeridge's and Jones' work 'an exaggeration of malignant propaganda.' At that time, Duranty reportedly had told a British Foreign Office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had died."

As well, Mr. Leroux focused on the Ukrainian community's campaign to revoke Duranty's Pulitzer. "Ukrainians contend that the long-lingering damage of Duranty's sins outweighs the Pulitzer board's contention that the award is for specific work of the prior year (Duranty won not for non-coverage of the famine, but for his coverage of the forming of the Five-Year Plan). They have read the after-the-fact New York Times repudiations of their reporter's work, including a piece on the editorial page in 1990 calling it, 'some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.' That piece appeared the same day as a review of a biography of Duranty titled 'Stalin's Apologist.' But they ask why the paper never has offered to return the prize," wrote Mr. Leroux.

The Los Angeles Times on June 14 printed a story headlined "The Blair affair fuels a 70-year-old scandal." Written by Tim Rutten and published on the front page of the newspaper's "Calendar" (arts, entertainment, style and culture) section under the rubric "Regarding Media," the article referred to "the 13-year-old campaign to strip The New York Times' Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize he won in 1932."

Mr. Rutten wrote: "American journalism has thrown up more than its share of vile characters; Duranty certainly was among the worst. As the Times' Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and '30s, he was an active agent of Soviet propaganda and disinformation - probably paid, certainly blackmailed, altogether willing. For years, Duranty lied, distorted and suppressed information to please Joseph Stalin."

"Duranty's reports did not simply ignore the famine. They denied its existence," the article pointed out. When Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer, Mr. Rutten continued, in his acceptance speech he spoke of his "respect [for] the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin," whom he called "a really great statesman."

Mr. Rutten's article, which also appeared online, then went on to excoriate those pressing the Duranty case, including "Ukrainian émigré organizations": "Curiously, the same organizations and commentators who are pressing the issue of Duranty's prize have been resolutely silent about one of the Holocaust's darkest chapters - the collaboration by tens of thousands of Ukrainians with the Nazi murderers of Eastern European Jewry." (For a full report on this aspect of the story, see page 8.)

Newspapers across the country picked up the Associated Press story previously reported in The Weekly's round-up of media coverage of the Duranty issue (June 15). Among them were: The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's largest newspaper; the Abilene Reporter of Texas, The Daily Gazette of Schenectady, N.Y., and the Palo Alto Daily News and the San Jose Mercury News, both in California.

In Russia, The Moscow Times of June 16 published a story by Matt Bivens, "One Pulitzer that should shake the world." Mr. Bivens noted that Duranty won his prize in 1932, "for 'excellence in reporting' out of the Soviet Union. That same year, the Stalin regime sealed the borders of Ukraine, ordered the confiscation of grain, and engineered a mass famine - one so neatly political that it stopped precisely at the Ukrainian-Russian internal border."

Juxtaposing the Blair case, which led to the publication of an exposé that began on the front page of The New York Times and took up four additional pages inside, with that of Duranty, in which an asterisk follows the discredited reporter's name in listing of the newspaper's Pulitzer winners, Mr. Bivens wrote the following:

"So, a cub reporter publishes a string of articles that plagiarize or embellish upon some pretty minor realities - and this provokes a monster mea culpa on the front page detailing the paper's sins, followed by the resignations of its editors. Meanwhile, another reporter is known to have been a serial liar, someone who actively worked over many years to cover up the equivalent of the Holocaust - and The New York Times admits as much, yet feels OK holding on to his Pulitzer. Doesn't that tarnish the other 88?"

The PBS network's "Online NewsHour" reported on June 11 that the Pulitzer Prize Board had announced it would reconsider the award given to Duranty. It noted that Sig Gissler, administrator of The Pulitzer Prizes, said that Duranty was honored in 1932 for stories published the previous year, which were unrelated to the Famine.

It further quoted Mr. Gissler, a former editor of The Milwaukee Journal and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, as explaining that "There are no written procedures regarding prize revocation. There are no standards or precedents for revoking the prize. We look at what would be reasonable and analyze the factors that would have to be considered."

Fox News Channel aired a longer segment on the campaign to strip Duranty of his Pulitzer on its Sunday evening newscast on June 15. The story, reported by Rick Leventhal, contained interviews with Askold Lozynskyj, president of the Ukrainian World Congress, and Roma Hadzewycz, editor-in-chief of The Ukrainian Weekly.

Among other broadcast media that reported on the campaign were New York area radio stations WNYC and WNBC, and the websites of CBS and ABC news.

The Weekly Standard, a U.S.-based magazine of news and opinion, on June 12 carried a piece titled "Pulitzer-winning lies."

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for The Washington Times, wrote: "At long last a Pulitzer Prize committee is looking into the possibility that the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty, The New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin's infamies, might be revoked."

He went on to quote some of the lies contained in the correspondent's dispatches and pointed out that "What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda but did nothing," citing S.J. Taylor's biography of Duranty, "Stalin's Apologist" as the source of information about editors' misgivings about their star correspondent's work, including a recommendation that he be replaced that was never acted on.

He concludes his commentary thus: "Let's all give a great encouraging cheer to the Pulitzer committee for undertaking a task 70 years late."

A major report on the Duranty case, in the form of an on-air discussion about who Duranty was and the decision facing the Pulitzer Prize committee was aired on June 11 by National Public Radio (a transcript of the segment may be purchased online).

"Talk of the Nation" Host Neal Conan spoke with Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and William Taubman, a professor of political science at Amherst College and author of several books about the USSR, including the most recent and highly acclaimed "Khrushchev: The Man and His Era."

The NPR discussants noted that Duranty had won his award for 1931 coverage of the USSR, but agreed that the Pulitzer committee would now have to determine whether Duranty lied in his Pulitzer-award winning stories as he did later when he concealed the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. In order to make that determination, Mr. Rosenstiel said the committee would have to have evidence that Duranty knew his coverage contained falsehoods.

In India, the country's largest English-language business daily, The Economic Times, on June 6 carried a story headlined "Pulitzer to review award for Duranty."

The story began as follows: "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 journalist wrong may soon be posthumously righted, reports UPI." It also cited The Ukrainian Weekly's May 25 news story by Andrew Nynka that first reported the Pulitzer Prize Board's review of the Duranty case.

The Economic Times went on to call the Ukrainian Famine "the largest single act of genocide in European history," and explained that "Stalin was determined to crush the slightest glimmer of Ukrainian national identity."

In Argentina, an article titled "The Republic of Ukraine" that drew attention to the Duranty affair appeared on June 12 in the newspaper Diario La Nueva Provincia S.R.L. The article made reference to the harsh fate of Ukraine under the Soviet regime, the massive political repressions, the Great Famine and the methods used by the Soviets to hide the truth about what was happening from the outside world, including the collaboration of sympathetic or servile foreign journalists.

It cited in particular the work of Duranty, quoting from one of his articles in The New York Times, in which he wrote: "The author just completed a 200-mile trip by car through Ukraine's heartland and can positively say that the crop is splendid and that everything being said or written about a famine is simply ridiculous" (a more specific reference to the article was not given).

Canada's CBS Radio carried a commentary by Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, who teaches political geography at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, and is research director of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association - the group that initiated the postcard campaign seeking revocation of Duranty's Pulitzer.

In the piece, which was broadcast on May 1, Dr. Luciuk said of Duranty: "What he was really was Stalin's apologist, a libertine prepared to prostitute accuracy for access. ... He betrayed the most fundamental principle of journalism, the obligation to report truthfully on what is observed."

"Those whose principled labors have earned them the honor of a Pulitzer should be revolted at knowing that Duranty is included amongst them," he emphasized.

National Review Online, which has previously reported on Duranty's and The Times' denial of the Famine, on May 15 carried a "guest comment" by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley titled "Times and again: Bogus journalism did not start with Jayson Blair." The writer, editorial director of the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute, wrote: "Fraudulent reporting by Jayson Blair should dislodge The New York Times as the paper of record. Such a downsizing should have happened long ago because of a writer whose lapses were worse."

After telling the story of Duranty's deception, the writer stated: "The Blair affair is a good time to renew the call for revocation [of Duranty's Pulitzer]. It is also a good time to reconsider how the Times, in light of Duranty, became the newspaper of record, and whether such a concept is even valid."

WorldNetDaily, an Internet newspaper, updated its report on the Duranty issue on June 10 with a story headlined: "All the lies fit to print: N.Y. Times 1932 Pulitzer could be revoked; Award to reporter who ignored Stalin's atrocities under review."

The article pointed out that "For years, the media watchdog group Accuracy in Media has sought to set the record straight regarding Duranty, his reporting and his Pulitzer - the most coveted and honored award in journalism. AIM approached both The Times and the Pulitzer Prize administrator about the issue. In a 1999 letter, Reed Irvine, chairman of AIM, pointed out that Duranty received special favors from Stalin's government, including a car and a mistress, designed to ensure the correspondent's cooperation."

Several days later, on June 14, WorldNetDaily carried a column by Les Kinsolving, a radio talk show host on WCBM in Baltimore whose commentaries are syndicated nationally, as well as White House correspondent for Talk Radio Network and WorldNetDaily. Mr. Kinsolving, who as a New York Times shareholder had brought up the Duranty issue in the past, tells of his encounters with then Times publisher Arthur ("Punch") Sulzberger, as well as with the current publisher Arthur ("Pinch") Sulzberger Jr.

He went on to write: "That the New York Times has refused to repudiate Duranty's Pulitzer - as The Washington Post sent back their lying reporter Janet Cooke's Pulitzer - is a continuing American journalistic outrage. If New York Times publisher 'Pinch' decides not to repudiate Duranty's Pulitzer and stop the annual bragging with Duranty as one of the Pulitzer recipients, young Sulzberger should be forced to resign, just as he (finally) forced the resignation of editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd."

Several Internet sites also devoted attention to the Duranty controversy. Articles appeared on www.duckseason.com ("Pulitzer lies" by Lance Morrow, professor of journalism at Boston University and former longtime essayist for Time magazine, June 9) and on NewsMax.com ("Times still backs 'greatest liar' reporter" by Phil Brennan, May 19). The online discussion group www.freerepublic.com cited The Weekly's report on the Pulitzer review of Duranty's prize and elicited comments on the topic, while www.worldnetdaily.com asked in its daily poll of June 11 "Should The N.Y. Times' 1932 Pulitzer Prize be revoked because the reporter turned out to be an apologist for Stalin?"

- compiled by Roma Hadzewycz

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, July 6, 2003, No. 27, Vol. LXXI

| Home Page |