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The whole issue of Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in 1932 has always pissed me off. It just rankles that he got away with it, so the least we can do is blacken the bastard's name posthumously for the sake of the millions of dead Ukrainians he lied about. Now that Harold Pinter has won a Nobel Prize for literature, I guess the tradition of lionising men of letters who are apologists for mass murdering leftists is still alive and well.

In December 1996, Robert Fisk of the London newspaper The Independent traveled to the mountains north of Khartoum where he met Osama bin Laden. The opening sentences of the article he wrote about the meeting went as follows: Osama Bin Laden sat in his gold fringed robe, guarded by loyal Arab mujahedin… . With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend. Chadored children danced in front of him, preachers acknowledged his wisdom. In a second article he wrote about the same meeting, Fisk upgraded bin Laden’s...

My favorite nugget in Donald A. Ritchie's history of the Washington press corps concerns... Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent. According to Mr. Ritchie, whenever Duranty was in Washington, he would set up shop at TASS, the official news service of the Soviet Union. Mr. Ritchie writes: "Sympathetic to the Soviet regime, Duranty felt more comfortable writing at the TASS office than at the Times's bureau, under the frosty gaze of bureau chief Arthur Krock." ...Duranty had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of articles remarkable for their uncritical praise of Joseph Stalin as the...

N. Korea, Without the RancorBy Barbara Demick, Times Staff WriterHe arrived at the entrance to a North Korean government-owned restaurant and karaoke club here in the Chinese capital with a handshake and a request. ... "There's never been a positive article about North Korea, not one," he said. "We're portrayed as monsters, inhuman, Dracula … with horns on our heads." ... "For basic life, we can live without America, but we can live better with" it, he said. Yet he voiced strong enthusiasm for his country's recent announcement that it had developed nuclear weapons. The declaration, which jarred U.S. officials,...

Font Size: A Media Meltdown? By Glenn Harlan Reynolds  Published   08/31/2004  Though it's looking less likely than it was a few weeks ago, John Kerry could still pull off a win in this presidential election. But there's already one clear loser: the so-called "mainstream media" of network television and major newspapers. Whoever winds up in the White House next year, the position of these traditional media outlets (or "legacy media" as some call them) continues to decline. That decline is partly technological in origin. Monopolistic or oligopolistic newspapers and broadcast outlets were the result of technology: economies of scale...

Seventy years after a government-engineered famine killed millions in Ukraine, a New York Times correspondent who failed to sound the alarm is under attackIf you get off the elevator on the eleventh floor of the New York Times building, and head down a long hall leading toward the executive dining rooms, you pass under the fixed gaze of some of the finest journalists in American history. Along the walls hang portraits commemorating all eighty-nine Pulitzer Prizes awarded to the Times to date, including those given to such notable lights as Thomas Friedman, Anthony Lewis, J. Anthony Lukas, and David Halberstam....

Walter Duranty, famous 70 years ago as a distinguished reporter for The New York Times, has slowly turned into a symbol of the wilfully deceptive reporting on the Soviet Union that misled the West about the nature of Stalinism for many years. This week Duranty appeared in the news again when the Pulitzer Prize board announced its decision not to strip him posthumously of the award he won in 1932 for persistently dishonest reporting from Moscow. Duranty served as Moscow correspondent from 1921 to 1934, wrote several books on Soviet politics and won an admiring public in America. Meanwhile, he...

KIEV, Ukraine - Increased international recognition of a forced famine that killed up to 10 million Ukrainians brought bittersweet relief Saturday to elderly survivors marking the 70th anniversary of a dark chapter in the history of Soviet communism. Gathering at a cathedral in the now independent Ukraine, survivors recalled their desperation during a famine historians say was provoked by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as part of his campaign to force peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. "This year is of particular significance for Ukraine, because the world has recognized the crime against the Ukrainian people," said...

Just because the left-wingers at the New York Times ran propaganda for Ed Asner's favorite genocidal dictator, Joseph Stalin, doesn't mean the paper has to return a tainted Pulitzer Prize. "The board determined that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case," Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler claimed today. After a worldwide outcry from Ukrainians and other decent human beings, a Pulitzer subcommittee in April launched a "review" of pro-Soviet propaganda written by the Times' useful idiot Walter Duranty, who in 1932 was handed the prize. Duranty somehow failed to report how Stalin's...

NEW YORK -- The 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to a New York Times reporter accused of deliberately ignoring the Ukrainian forced famine will not be revoked, an administrator for the journalism awards said Friday. "The board determined that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case," said a statement from Sig Gissler, Pulitzer administrator. A review of Walter Duranty's work was launched in April by a Pulitzer subcommittee. In the 86-year history of the awards, no Pulitzer has ever been revoked.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to a New York Times reporter accused of deliberately ignoring the forced famine in Ukraine will not be revoked, an administrator for the journalism awards said Friday. "The board determined that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case," Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler said in a statement. A review of Walter Duranty's work was launched in April by a Pulitzer subcommittee. The review came amid complaints that Duranty's reports intentionally made no mention of the Soviet Union's forced famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933...

Receive FREE updates by email: | Before Jayson Blair: AIM and The New York Times By William AlfordNovember 12, 2003 Subsequent to the fallout over Jayson Blair's numerous instances of fraud, inaccuracy and plagiarism, senior staff at The N.Y. Times surely hoped that credibility doubts would end by throwing the 27-year-old journalist over the side in May. Questions nonetheless persisted over such practices as the widespread misuse of unnamed sources, attributing freelancers' work to staff reporters, and insufficient research and 'advocacy' journalism. On an early June "day that breaks my heart," publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced the 'resignations' of...

To the Editor: Regarding Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s suggestion to the Pulitzer Prize Board that revoking Walter Duranty's 1932 prize recalled the "Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories" ("Times Should Lose Pulitzer From 30's, Consultant Says," news article, Oct. 29): Those targeted for "airbrushing" were already murdered, languishing in the gulag or forced into exile after having been falsely accused of espionage, treason, sabotage and other "crimes." The N.K.V.D., the predecessor of the K.G.B., then ordered libraries to expunge all mention and to relegate them to the status of non-persons, a fate that persisted for...

Since Jayson Blair was exposed and fired on May 1, the New York Times has been performing atonement for partisanship and hubris. First came the long and painful front-page account of how management had been guilty of astonishing incompetence in failing to recognize Blair's deceptions. Next there was the establishment of the Siegal committee, which met for several weeks to recommend damage-control measures such as the appointment of an ombudsman for the first time ever. When this failed to end the storm, Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. fired Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd. (Sulzberger, a permanent boy...

Airbrushing History? October 23, 2003 Professor Mark von Hagen, a historian at Columbia University, says a 1932 Pulitzer Prize should be rescinded. That was a long time ago. Why does it matter now? Because the prize went to a liar for his lies. And they were very influential lies, whose impact was of historic importance. The liar was Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times. Duranty wrote at the time that the Ukrainian famine, which had been amply reported in the less prestigious Hearst newspapers, was a false rumor. But the famine was real, and it was no...

MOSCOW - There’s nothing more ungainly than newspapers, when their sanctimoniousness is aroused, and they try walking with their feet in their mouths. Call this the Duranty phenomenon. Walter Duranty was the New York Times journalist who won a Pulitzer prize, journalism’s highest award in the US, for his reporting on Russia in 1931. Duranty died in 1957, and his editors at the Times, plus his Pulitzer board judges, have all joined him in the grave, so they are easy targets for critics. They believe that Duranty’s Pulitzer should be rescinded on the ground that he failed at the time...

<p>NEW YORK — A 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to the New York Times should be revoked, says a historian assigned by the newspaper to review the winning work, which has been questioned for years.</p> <p>A subcommittee of the Pulitzer Board has reviewed the awarding of the prize won in 1932 by Walter Duranty for his series on the Soviet Union. The review was sparked by complaints that Mr. Duranty deliberately ignored, in later coverage, the forced terror famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people.</p>

<p>NEW YORK (AP) -- A 1932 Pulitzer Prize awarded to The New York Times should be revoked, according to a historian hired by the newspaper to review the winning work, which has been questioned for years.</p> <p>A subcommittee of the Pulitzer Board has been reviewing the prize won by writer Walter Duranty for his series on Russia. The review was sparked by complaints that Duranty deliberately ignored in later coverage the forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions of people.</p>

Beginning in 1928 and through 1933 Joseph Stalin implemented his Five-Year Plan of Collectivization. Under this Five-Year Plan Ukraine in particular suffered from an imposed famine that lasted from 1932 until 1933, during which about 7 million to 10 million people perished. Journalists like George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty who were in Moscow at the time made no attempt to let the world know the truth about this famine that Stalin imposed, rather they denied any possibility of this. The article "Gareth Jones: Hero of Ukraine" by Martin Sieff of United Press International (UPI) cites a statement made by...

In this week's Insight cover story ("Duranty's Deception," July 22-Aug. 4) and in other articles on the campaign to take away New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Soviet Union because it has been proved to be deliberately fraudulent, it has been written that no Pulitzer has ever been revoked or withdrawn. It is stated that the Washington Post returned the Pulitzer awarded Janet Cooke in 1981, but that no action was taken by the Pulitzer Prize board. "Although the Pulitzer has never been revoked, it was once returned," said the Associated Press in...