A Pulitzer Prize for lying [On the NYT]

National Post ^ | Thursday, May 29, 2003 | Ian Hunter

[yonif]

Jayson Blair, the reporter recently sacked when The New York Times discovered his penchant for fabricating stories, is not the first reporter to have trouble with the truth. More than half a century ago another New York Times reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for lying. His name was Walter Duranty, his beat was Russia, and shilling for Joseph Stalin was his specialty.

On May 1, 2003 a concerted worldwide campaign began to have Duranty (who died in 1957) stripped of his 1932 Pulitzer Prize; thousands of postcards have been mailed to the Pulitzer Committee requesting a posthumous revocation of Duranty's prize.

Malcolm Muggeridge, who was Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1932-33, called Duranty "the greatest liar I ever knew in 50 years of journalism." Likewise correspondent Joseph Alsop said: "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade."

Yet from 1921 until 1934 Duranty was the most influential foreign correspondent in Russia. His dispatches were regarded as authoritative; indeed Duranty helped to shape U.S. foreign policy. Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor (Stalin's Apologist, Oxford University Press, 1990) has demonstrated that Duranty's reporting was a critical factor in President Roosevelt's 1933 decision to grant recognition to the Soviet Union.

Duranty, an unattractive, oversexed little man, with a wooden leg, falsified facts, spread lies and half truths, invented occurrences that never happened, and turned a blind eye to the man-made famine that starved to death more than 10 million people (according to an International Commission of Jurists which examined this tragedy in the late 1980s). When snippets of the truth began to leak out, Duranty coined the phrase: "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." This phrase, or a variant thereof, has since proved useful to a rich variety of ideologues who contend that a worthy end justifies any means. Yet when the Pulitzer committee originally conferred its prize on Duranty, they cited his "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity."

In the spring of 1933 Malcolm Muggeridge did an audacious thing; without official permission he set off on a train journey through what had formerly been the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and the North Caucuses. What Muggeridge witnessed there, he never forgot. In a series of articles smuggled out in the British diplomatic pouch, he described a man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, by the thousands, dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries guarded by the army and police. "At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into cattle trucks at gunpoint -- all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet." At a German co-operative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized wilderness, he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust of bread. In his Diary, Muggeridge wrote: "Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood."

Few people believed Muggeridge. His dispatches were cut. He was sacked by the Guardian and forced to leave Russia. He was vilified and slandered, and Walter Duranty's voice led the chorus of denunciation -- although privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had probably been starved to death -- adding, characteristically, " ... but they're only Russians."

If vindication for Muggeridge was a long time coming, it cannot have been sweeter than when Duranty's biographer, Susan Taylor, wrote in 1990: "But for Muggeridge's eyewitness accounts of the famine in the spring of 1933 and his stubborn chronicle of the event, the effects of the crime upon those who suffered it might well have remained as hidden from scrutiny as its perpetrators intended. Little thanks he has received for it over the years, although there is a growing number who realize what a singular act of honesty and courage his reportage constituted."

Alas, by the time those words were written, Muggeridge had died.

So far the postcard revocation campaign has had little effect on the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Their spokesman, Sig Gissler, said: "After careful consideration of the issue, it has decided not to withdraw the prize that was given over 70 years ago in a different time and under different circumstances."

For journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge, truth was truth and lies were lies, at any time, and in all circumstances. For Jayson Blair and, worse, for the Pulitzer Prize committee, truth seems to be a rather more malleable concept.

Ian Hunter, professor emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University, was Malcolm Muggeridge's first biographer.

[backhoe]

-The Old Grey Info-Slut... the NYT/Jayson Blair Affair--

[friendly]

Duranty is the greatest disgrace in the history of journalism. He MUST have the Pulitzer stripped to restore credibility to a dying profession.

[Cincinatus]

Malcolm Muggeridge, who was Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1932-33, called Duranty "the greatest liar I ever knew in 50 years of journalism."

I guess he never met Sid Blumenthal.

[Thane_Banquo]

The Nobel committee probably wants him to keep the prize because of his unwavering defense of leftism, even in the face of overwhelming facts.

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

Pulitzer Prize board begins review of Duranty's award

[friendly]

Malcolm Muggeridge, who was Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1932-33, called Duranty "the greatest liar I ever knew in 50 years of journalism." I guess he never met Sid Blumenthal.

You are so very right. The democrat party/Big Media incestuous cesspool is filled with the intellectual bastard progeny of Duranty.

And, like the gaseous fecal mass he is, Sid Blumenthal rises to the top of the cesspool.

[RayChuang88]

From the article:

"In a series of articles smuggled out in the British diplomatic pouch, he described a man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, by the thousands, dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries guarded by the army and police."

What that British reporter saw was the effects of the forced conversion of farms in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1933 to collective operation, an operation that essentially sent ALL of the agricultural output of Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus out of that region. The result was horrible--I've read reports that something like FOURTEEN MILLION persons died from mass starvation, mass shootings and forced relocation to labor camps over this conversion. Just this act killed more people than all of the Nazi concentration camps combined.

It's small wonder why Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his writings estimated almost 100 million Soviet citizens died at the hands of the Soviet government for political reasons ever since the 1917 October Revolution.

[Servant of the Nine]

although privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had probably been starved to death -- adding, characteristically, " ... but they're only Russians."

Stalin admitted to Churchill at Yalta that there were 12 Million.
God only knows what the real total was.

' So9

[Peach]

Stalin famously said one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

[martin_fierro]

Ping!

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Sid was an understudy.

[Liz]

Thanks for the ping.

[Uncle George]

And they stripped Jim Thorp of all his Olympic medals because he played on a sandlot baseball team, sheesh.

[Tamzee]

We should be more understanding of the left. They have more important things to worry about than crimes against humanity that resulted in millions of agonizing deaths... folks are driving SUVs, ya know.

[GladesGuru]

That the Pulitzer Price Committee has not revoked Duranty's Pulitzer Prize proves that there is still lots of "cess" left in the Liberal media pool.

[friendly]

Duranty degrades the Pulitzers. Where does the Pulitzer Committee meet?

The Ukrainian-Americans lost 7 million of their free farmer countrymen in the early 1930's intentionally starved to death by Stalin (with all their food stolen and exported), and rabidly, ferociously covered up by the sc*mb*g degenerate Duranty.

A combined FR and Ukrainian Freep would be in order.