NEWS AND VIEWS: Foolitzer Prize awarded to Pulitzer Board and The New York Times (05/23/04)

NEWS AND VIEWS: Foolitzer Prize awarded to Pulitzer Board and The New York Times

by Dr. Jaroslaw Sawka

WARREN, Mich. - The Walter Duranty Foolitzer Prize Committee has awarded the first ever Foolitzer Prize to the Pulitzer Board and The New York Times jointly for their shameful decisions, respectively, not to revoke and not to return Walter Duranty's Pulitzer, and for the crude rationalizations of their decisions.

Each of the recipients will receive the two-cent monetary award - one American penny and one Canadian penny - to symbolize the combined efforts of the Ukrainian American and Ukrainian Canadian communities to have the Pulitzer awarded to Walter Duranty revoked.

Markian Pelech of Hillsborough, N.J., has been awarded the $100 prize for nominating these two "winners."

The joint award was a total surprise, as the original intent of the committee was to recognize a single work of biased journalism injurious to Ukraine and Ukrainians. It was originally thought that the Foolitzer Prize would be awarded to a Duranty-type individual engaged in misinformation or disinformation, and not to two of the most prestigious journalistic institutions in the world.

It proved truly difficult to select a clear-cut winner or to determine which recipient's "spin" was more contemptible: that of the Pulitzer Board for not revoking Duranty's Pulitzer or that of The New York Times for not renouncing and returning it. The rationales given by both the Pulitzer Board and The Times for their decisions were deemed disingenuous and deceitful by the Foolitzer Prize Committee.

Despite this outcome, the heroic yearlong campaign by Ukrainian American and Canadian communities clearly succeeded in making the Ukrainian Famine (Holodomor) and Duranty's ill-gotten Pulitzer household words referred to in many publications and by numerous media pundits along the entire political spectrum from the right to the left.

On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board announced its decision not to revoke Duranty's Pulitzer. It argued that Duranty's reporting in 1931 didn't have anything to do with the Famine of 1932-1933 (Holodomor), as though there had been no uprisings, evictions, expropriations and confiscations, deportations, mass executions or famine prior to 1932. This is tantamount to confining Holocaust discussions to the year 1944 and deliberately ignoring the previous Einsatzgruppen "Aktions" and the ghetto liquidations.

The Pulitzer Board "concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception" despite Duranty's own acknowledgments that his official dispatches always reflected the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own, as per agreement between The New York Times and the Soviet authorities. Thus, by his own admission, Duranty was acting not as an independent journalist but as a propagandist for the Soviet government. The original intent of the Pulitzer Prize was to reward journalism not propaganda.

It is sad indeed that this board doesn't want to distinguish between journalism and propaganda. This is a grievous injustice not only to the memories of the victims of the Famine, but also to the memories of two courageous journalists, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, who refused to compromise their profession and reported accurately despite vilification by none other than Duranty himself.

Unfortunately, The New York Times isn't any more honorable than the Pulitzer Board. It is now apparent that The Times never had any intention of returning Duranty's Pulitzer. It hired a professor of history, Dr. Mark von Hagen, to analyze Duranty's work and bolster The Times' hold on this prize. This turned out to be a disaster for The Times because Prof. von Hagen's detailed report was not supportive. In fact, Prof. von Hagen stated that the prize should not have been awarded to Duranty. The report was quietly buried and ignored not only by its sponsor, The New York Times, but also by the Pulitzer Board.

Upon realizing that "experts" from academia weren't about to "duranty" themselves for the sake of the status of Duranty's Pulitzer, various spokespersons, most notably Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., started to "spin" wildly.

One spokesman tried to distort the Ukrainian community's grass-roots campaign as a slick, well-financed operation as though it was coordinated and financed by millionaires and conspirator cabals.

Another spokesperson alleged that Duranty's Pulitzer couldn't be returned because The New York Times didn't have it and, besides, Duranty was dead and all this happened so long ago and ... etc., etc.

Of course, this was all a smokescreen because no one ever suggested that Duranty be exhumed and his coffin searched for the prize. All that the Ukrainian communities wanted was reassurance that The New York Times would stop taking credit and expressing pride in this particular prize, and stop counting it as part of what is now a tainted collection of Pulitzers.

As the deadline for the November meeting of the Pulitzer Board approached, panic must have set in. Mr. Sulzberger actually contacted the Pulitzer Board, warning them that revoking Duranty's Pulitzer would be setting a "bad" precedent and would be akin to the Stalinist practice of "airbrushing" victims - in this case, airbrushing Duranty out of history and into oblivion. This, too, is spurious because the campaign against Duranty's Pulitzer was never to make him "disappear" but, on the contrary, to make him a gold standard example of what should happen when a propagandist gets an award meant for a journalist. It is very important for all that his name, his prize and the roles of The New York Times and the Pulitzer Board in this whole affair serve as a historical lesson to deter others from compromising the tenets of their profession for any prize.

The correct actions would have restored journalistic integrity. Revocation of Duranty's Pulitzer would demonstrate that the Pulitzer Board would not let its name and reputation be sullied by propagandists. Return of the Pulitzer by The Times would show that it truly believes in its professed obligation and promise to publish "all the news that's fit to print." Now that, Mr. Sulzberger, would have been a "good" precedent. The New York Times and the Pulitzer Board squandered a golden opportunity to set things right.

They both deserve the Foolitzer.

POSTSCRIPT: Who will earn the Foolitzer award for 2004?

Mel Gibson with his "Passion of the Christ" this year has started raising many "passions." The hysteria began to rise even before the script was finalized, let alone any filming begun. It became feverish with Mel Gibson's interview in the March issue of Reader's Digest in which he mentioned the Ukrainian 1932-1933 Famine (Holodomor) in the same breath as the Holocaust. Immediately, he was set upon by the two most notorious self-appointed hate experts, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who specialize in selectively finding and condemning "hate." These attempts at censorship, browbeating and denial that the Holodomor was genocide unwittingly accomplished just the opposite.

How can one decide which of these two characters is worse? Neither of them ever found any "hate" in Israel when the lynch mobs were shouting "death" to John Demjanjuk after his acquittal. Nor did they find any "hate" when U.S. taxpayers were forced to subsidize "art" intended to humiliate Christ and Christians by publicly showcasing a cross in a jar of urine. Now, they're engaging in genocide denial? Incredible.

It seems we are headed for yet another shared Foolitzer Prize next year. Let's hope nothing worse comes along, as this is bad enough.

Don't forget to send your nominations for 2004 to: The Walter Duranty Foolitzer Committee c/o Ukrainian Graduates of Detroit-Windsor, P.O. Box 92415 Warren, MI 48092

Dr. Jaroslaw Sawka is the spokesperson for the Walter Duranty Foolitzer Prize Committee on behalf of the Ukrainian Graduates of Detroit-Windsor.

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