Free Republic

It's easy to view the 1932 Pulitzer Prize award to N.Y. Times reporter Walter Duranty "for his series of dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan". It seems the Pulitzer Prize Board will never rescind Duranty's award, though he was a willing tool of Stalin, whose government is ranked by the University of Hawaii "Democide" (People Killing) website in the "Deka-Megamurder" category with 61.9 million murders between 1917-1987. (Stalin was only in power between 1924 and 1953.) We have a clear picture of how Sen. Joseph McCarthy and Pres. Richard Nixon, each individually behaved, and...

When a new book came out, the great C. S. Lewis would first seek out an old one on the same subject. That’s good advice for embattled Americans. In fact, two old books address what is happening today with rare perception. Regent College Publishing has reissued The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove, the two volumes of Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge. Paul Johnson called it one of the great autobiographies of our time, which might be an understatement. Wisdom and wit leap off the pages, and there’s even a news hook: Russia has invaded Ukraine and that...

You’ve probably never heard of Gareth Jones. You’ve certainly heard of the writer he inspired, and the classic dystopian novel that writer created. You were forced to read it, or at least the Cliff’s Notes, in high school. But shorn of its context, that novel lacks the full punch it could deliver. Mr. Jones (2019), starring Peter Sarsgaard and James Norton, directed by Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, provides that context in a must-see film. Mr. Jones is powerfully relevant today, even more than when it premiered in 2019. Mr. Jones tells the true story of...

Is the New York Times "airbrushing" history again? It would seem so. On Saturday, November 22, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko presided over a commemoration in Kiev of the 75th anniversary of the famine genocide of 1932-1933 that took the lives of 7-10 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "murder by hunger"), it is one of the greatest mass murders in history, and one of the cruelest ... The New York Times prides itself on being the national "newspaper of record" and still carries its longtime motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" in the upper left-hand corner...

On February 17, 2017, President Donald Trump created a firestorm of controversy when he tweeted that the news media (The New York Times, CNN, NBC, and many more) is not his enemy, but is the enemy of the American people. In scrutinizing the Times, in relation to the culture war and major issues within the public square, the indictment, though I have many differences with the president, rings true for me, because, the vast majority of the time, I find myself on one side of an issue and theyÂ’re on the other.And, more than that, there is an overall historical...

If you want to understand the Islamic forces that are gaining strength in Egypt and scaring people here and abroad, let me tell you about my dinner in the home of Muslim Brotherhood activists. First, meet my hostess: Sondos Asem, a 24-year-old woman who is pretty much the opposite of the stereotypical bearded Brotherhood activist. Sondos is a middle-class graduate of the American University in Cairo, where I studied in the early 1980s (“that’s before I was born,” she said wonderingly, making me feel particularly decrepit). She speaks perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps...

Book Gives Details of 1932 'Killing by Hunger' in UkraineROME, NOV. 17, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The sober skies and short days of November remind Romans that this is the month to pray for the dead. It seems fitting that this month opened with a presentation of new documents regarding one of the most tragic -- and virtually unacknowledged -- events of the modern age, the Ukrainian Famine. "The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine" by Father Athanasius McVay and Professor Lubomyr Luciuk was released Oct. 26 with...

“Now, most people think that this left-leaning press bias is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it’s not. And the consequences are not just skewed elections, as if that’s not serious enough, that’s just political ruin. But the consequence of this left-leaning press bias has cost a lot of people their lives–a lot of people…”

The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday. Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.Jones' reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's...

As freedom-lovers throughout the world celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the freedom-lovers at the New York Times, if there are any, have to be reflecting on that paper's own role in the Wall's construction. As it happens, no English-speaker was more responsible for the savage sprawl of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain that reinforced it than the Times' own ace reporter, Walter Duranty. In November 1933, the one-legged reporter had come to Washington, D.C. from Moscow to witness President Roosevelt officially recognize the Soviet Union. Duranty knew, and everyone else knew, that...

We know that history holds many surprises. One doesn't expect to learn more about the secret history of of the Gulag than we already know from both Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Acrcipelago" and Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A history." This feat, however, is exactly what author Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished: the previously unknown story of the thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, sought employment and a better future in the "worker's paradise" built by the Bolsheviks. All kinds of Americans joined the exodus. Some of them were Communists or fellow-travelors but the majority were average Americans - skilled workers promised paid passage,...

This is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism." It was, in the words of the author, "the least heralded migration in American history" and a period when "for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving." Most of these expatriates, not...

Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians Who Say Others Died, Too MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which left millions dead from starvation and related diseases. Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide. When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and into collective farms, special military units requisitioned grain and other food...

In 1932, one of the most prestigious honors in journalism, the Pulitzer Prize, was awarded to Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter who was then serving as foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union. Though many other Pulitzers have been handed out over the years, Duranty's is remembered more than most. In the on-line archive of the prizes (www.pulitzer.org), his award is noted in a bland, one-sentence explanation that reads simply: "For his series of dispatches on Russia, especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." The reference is to Duranty's reporting on Stalin's economic plan. Duranty's dispatches helped...

Serious movement in D.C. – and if I hadn't been there, I would not have believed it. For several months Joan Wire and her daughter have been trying to secure an appointment with a highly effective government official we'll simply call Mr. Washington. Joan Wire is the stalwart wife of Mike Wire. Mike is the storied "man on the bridge," the single most critical eyewitness in the saga of TWA Flight 800, the 747 that was inexplicably blown out of the sky on the night of July 17, 1996. The CIA built its notorious zoom-climb animation around Mike's position on...

If you want to know what the mullahs want you to think, just read the “reporting” by the Washington Post’s own Karl Vick, who Wednesday shared a byline with Dafna Linzer from Tehran to announce nothing less than “a profound change in Iran’s political orthodoxy.” You may have thought that Iranian clerical fascism was not subject to such dramatic transformation, but Vick, the consensus candidate for the Walter Duranty Prize awarded to apologists for tyrants, believes otherwise. And what is the evidence? The Iranians are calling for direct talks with the United States on the mullahs’ project to go nuclear....

Former NY Times Reporter: '93 Pulitzer Should Be Revoked By Sherrie Gossett CNSNews.com Staff Writer March 22, 2006 Washington (CNSNews.com) - Castigating the press for "journalistic crimes" committed during its reporting on the Balkans wars of the 1990s, retired New York Times reporter David Binder claims the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting awarded to both the Times and New York's Newsday "should, in all fairness and honesty, be revoked." Binder was speaking at a press conference for the release of a new book criticizing the war reporting. Binder wrote the foreword to the book by Peter Brock, titled "Media...

Traitors of Record: The Record of the New York TimesBy Fedora “. . .the most untrustworthy paper in the United States. . .” --President Dwight Eisenhower, referring to the New York TimesIntroductionLast week Senator John Cornyn criticized the New York Times for endangering national security with a James Risen story on NSA surveillance timed to coincide with a vote on the Patriot Act and, incidentally, with the release of a book by Risen. A review of the record illustrates that endangering national security through irresponsible leaks is nothing new for the New York Times. Some particularly outrageous examples are worth...

Media: It wasn't covered by The New York Times, but the Ukrainian protest outside the Times building was news fit to print.Haven't heard anything about the hourlong demonstration on Nov. 18? Few have. The establishment media ignored the Ukrainians' protest against the Pulitzer Prize that Times correspondent Walter Duranty got in 1932 for his reporting on Josef Stalin's Soviet Union in 1931. Our search could not turn up a single instance of news coverage of this event.Seems like the Times could at least have sent an intern downstairs to make note of the demonstration. ..... But we understand. Why should...

NY Times/Duranty Protest - Friday, November 18, 2005 –12:00 noon –opposite the NY Times building - 229 West 43rd Street between 7th and 8th in Manhattan. Organizer: United Ukrainian American Organizations of Greater New York.