Yep. It's OK to go after the Nazis but not after the commies. It's some kind of brotherhood thingy.
Malcolm Muggeridge was a similar Marxist reporter in the USSR at the time (for a British newspaper, I think) -- he may have even known Duranty.
But Muggeridge reported honest stories about what he saw in the Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. When he got back to Britain, he was so appalled at the way his stories had been doctored by his newspapers to hide the truth about the Soviets that he became a very conservative writer.