Gee, I wonder how NewsGuard would have dealt with Uncle Walter and his reporting from the Soviet Union back in the day? Gee, I wonder how NewsGuard would have dealt with Uncle Walter and his reporting from the Soviet Union back in the day?NYT hired Walter Duranty to cover up Stalin’s crimes, but their affiliation with communism didn’t start there.
Karl Marx himself was an international correspondent for one of the forebears of the NYT.
Sometimes cinema can bring history alive and little known facts and personalities can be highlighted or rediscovered, and so it is here. Gareth Jones was a diplomat and journalist who wrote about the terrible famine in the Ukraine during the early 1930s which the Soviet's, and many others, were trying to hide at the time. It's a sober but fascinating insight into a almost forgotten episode, and is very skilfully done with a fine central performance by [James] Norton as Jones and well staged scenes of his tense visits to the USSR and his gradual discovery of the regimes corruption and lies. Tightly scripted and directed, this is one worth discovering.