IN THE PRESS: Columbia Journalism Review, New York papers, VOA on Duranty case (11/30/03)

THE 70th ANNIVERSARY OF THE FAMINE-GENOCIDE IN UKRAINE

IN THE PRESS: Columbia Journalism Review, New York papers, VOA on Duranty case

Columbia Journalism Review

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - The Columbia Journalism Review and several New York-based newspapers, as well as the Voice of America were among the news media outlets that recently focused on the case of Walter Duranty and his 1932 Pulitzer Prize.

The November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review dedicated over 4,400 words - in an article titled "Should this Pulitzer be pulled?" - to the issue of Walter Duranty and the 1932 Pulitzer Prize he won for reporting from the former Soviet Union.

The author of the article, Contributing Editor Douglas McCollam, wrote: "In 1932, at the age of 47, Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer for a series of stories that the board thought showed a 'profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia,' consistent with 'the best type of foreign correspondence.' Next to Duranty's portrait appears the following note: 'Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.' "

He continued: "Indeed they have, and this year, more than 70 years after Duranty won the prize, both Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, and members of the Pulitzer board have found themselves inundated with letters, postcards, faxes, e-mails and phone calls demanding that Duranty's prize be returned or revoked. The campaign has left some of its targets mystified. 'The whole thing is just odd,' says Andrew Barnes, chairman and chief executive officer of the St. Petersburg Times, who has served on the Pulitzer board for seven years. David Klatell, who was on the board for a year as interim dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, also was a bit stumped when he began receiving the letters last fall. 'It's been a fairly massive writing campaign,' says Klatell, who estimates that he and Sig Gissler, administrator of the prizes, have received tens of thousands of cards and letters. 'Whoever funded it has spent a good deal of money,' Klatell says."

Mr. McCollam wrote further:

"Both Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his father, Arthur Sulzberger Sr., the previous publisher, declined to be interviewed for this article, but a Times spokesman, Toby Usnik, did e-mail a statement, saying, in part, that The Times has 'reported often and thoroughly on the defects in Duranty's journalism, as viewed through the lens of later events.'

"In April the board voted to consider the question again, forming a special committee to investigate, a step it hasn't taken in the past. Gissler, who became administrator of the prizes in 2002, says the committee was not formed in response to the letter-writing campaign, which he says didn't start in earnest until around May of this year, but because the board views the allegations against Duranty as serious enough to merit an in-depth inquiry. The special committee is scheduled to make a report to the full board at its November meeting. The committee's preliminary findings were being calculated as I worked on this article, but Gissler declined to make it available, nor would he comment on the substance of the controversy.

"Most of the 22 other present and past board members I contacted were similarly mum, including William Safire, the Times columnist who currently co-chairs the Pulitzer board, and Richard Oppel, the editor of the Austin American-Statesman, who heads the special investigative committee.

Mr. McCollum said that in order to get a clearer picture of the issues facing the Pulitzer board, he spent some time researching Duranty and his work in the Library of Congress.

"Duranty worked within the [Soviet] system, trading softer coverage for continuing access. Deciding whether that exchange ended up with the Times substantially whitewashing Soviet atrocities requires a closer examination of Duranty's work," he added.

The author concluded:

"Taken together the 13 articles (11 were part of a series, datelined from Paris, that ran in June of 1931; the two others were separate stories), are a sometimes prescient exploration of a kind of totalitarian government the world had never seen before. Duranty's writing style is often stilted, and the stories are flawed in many respects, but overall seem sound, and even include notes of moral condemnation rarely found elsewhere in his work.

"The same cannot be said about Duranty's coverage - or lack of coverage - of the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine. After five years of brutal agricultural collectivization, Stalin increased the grain quotas due from Ukraine despite a poor harvest year. When it became evident that the quotas would not be met, Soviet troops and party activists swept through Ukraine tearing apart peasant farms looking for secret grain hordes. They stripped the people clean and the result was catastrophic. Though no reliable census data are available, most historians now estimate at least 5 million people starved to death. Ukrainian groups put the figure at 7 million to 10 million and passionately believe it reflects a deliberate campaign by Stalin to break resistance to the Soviets in Ukraine and obliterate the Ukrainian identity, though not all historians agree with that interpretation.

"If the case for revoking the prize is based solely on the series that Duranty won for, then it is less compelling. If it is based instead on the totality of his reporting, then the prize should probably be revoked," Mr. McCollum concluded.

New York Sun

"Ukrainians are besieging The New York Times office in New York City - and in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Toronto and Moscow - to try to persuade the newspaper to end its equivocating over Walter Duranty and his 1932 Pulitzer Prize," wrote Eric Wolff in a November 18 article published by the New York Sun titled "Ukrainians protest prize to N.Y. Times."

The article went on to report that the demonstrations would consist mainly of handing out informational leaflets at the doors of The New York Times bureaus and were timed to allow the newspaper to mull over its position before a Pulitzer Prize Board meeting on November 21.

According to the article, the leaflets "detail Duranty's coverage of the Soviet Union while he was The Times' correspondent in Moscow and ask, 'When Jayson Blair's lies were uncovered, The New York Times apologized. Why won't they now?'"

The article went on to say that, "The two Ukrainian groups [Ukrainian World Congress and Ukrainian Congress Committee of America] plan to demonstrate on [November 21], which will include further leafleting, outside the Pulitzer Board's meeting room at Columbia University."

"This is not a protest against the Pulitzer Board," the article quoted Askold Lozynskyj, president of the UWC, as saying. "It's a vigil to let the board know that the Ukrainian community is very interested in the decision. We realize it's not an easy one for them."

The article also reported that, "The administrator of the Pulitzer Board, Sig Gissler, had not known of the vigil, but said, 'We're certainly aware of their concerns. Our inquiry is ongoing.' "

New York Newsday

The daily newspaper New York Newsday reported on November 15 that some 3,000 people marched in New York City that day to show the world they remember the " 'hidden holocaust' or 'forgotten famine.' "

Staff writer Elizabeth Cady Brown reported in the article that: "It was crisp and sunny for the marchers gathered at noon in front of St. George Catholic Church in the East Village. The procession, a sea of blue and gold Ukrainian flags and colorful embroidered head scarves, moved slowly up Third Avenue to Bryant Park, ending at St. Patrick's Cathedral for a requiem mass. It was at once a celebration of Ukrainian culture and a time of collective mourning."

The article, titled "'Forgotten famine' remembered," quoted several of the marchers who told Ms. Brown how they were affected by the famine, either directly or indirectly. Paul Makovski, who lives in Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., but was born in Ukraine, told Ms. Brown that, "My mother and her sister ate anything to stay alive. They would make bread with bark or grass. It was terrible for them."

Ms. Brown also spoke with Ukraine's permanent representative to the United Nations, Valeriy Kuchinsky, who told the journalist that he hoped the demonstration would increase international awareness of the genocide. "We don't want to avenge the history. The main thing is that mass human rights violations must never be repeated. For that, we must remember," Mr. Kuchinsky said.

The New York Daily News reported on the famine commemorations that took place on November 15 in New York City in its November 18 edition. In a subsection titled "Protest set for Times," columnist Paul Colford wrote that "Ukrainian groups gathered in New York last week for a memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral and other programs marking the 70th anniversary of the Ukraine Famine that killed millions."

Mr. Colford also reported that the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America has planned to step up its campaign urging the revocation of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize won by Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty of The New York Times by protesting outside of The Times headquarters building and its bureaus around the country. "Another protest is set for Friday [November 21] at Columbia University, where the Pulitzer Board is due to meet, months after it was announced a subcommittee would review the Duranty case," Mr. Colford wrote.

Voice of America

Voice of America also carried an English-language story on the controversy surrounding Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize. On November 19 Kerry Sheridan reported that "A controversy is heating up over a prestigious journalism award given to a reporter whose allegedly biased coverage of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s largely ignored the famine that resulted in millions of Ukrainian deaths. More and more members of New York's Ukrainian community are calling for the Pulitzer Prize to be revoked."

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