Posted on 01/14/2007 4:37:17 PM PST by mark pelech
Invalid: Walter Duranty’s 1932 Pulitzer Prize
By Markian Pelech
On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced its failure to revoke the Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty for his articles of 1931 about the Soviet Union , claiming that “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case.”
A review of Duranty’s prize-winning articles in conjunction with Columbia University Professor Mark von Hagen’s report on the articles for The New York Times shows sufficient evidence of deception to invalidate Duranty’s Pulitzer.
The Pulitzer Board declared deception the criterion for invalidating Duranty’s prize. Deception has been proven. Walter Duranty's prize is invalidated, regardless of the Board's future action.
For the full text of the review, refer to http://duranty.pelech.org/duranty2007/invalid.pdf.
Markian Pelech may be contacted at markpelech@yahoo.com.
looks to me like Duranty's Prize stands.....what's with the title?
Maybe his ghost and Dan Rather can meet in the Has-Beens Bar and have boat drinks.
BU not BC!
Whodda thunk a college prof and a NYT journalist liars!
November 24, 2003, 9:20 a.m.
Times Lied, Millions Died
The paper of record’s Cold War record.
So that's it then. Despite all the protests, the Pulitzer Prize board has decided that it will not revoke the award won by Walter Duranty of the New York Times for his reporting in Stalin's Soviet Union. This was not a decision that it took lightly, mind you. The board's members want everyone to understand that they only took their decision after "more than six months of study and deliberation." Six months — that's around one month, perhaps less, for each million who died in the holodomor, the man-made famine that Duranty tried so hard to deny.
Here's how Petro Solovyschuk from the Ukraine's Vinnytsia region remembers that time:
I no longer lived in my house. I slept in patches of clover, in haystacks; I was swollen from hunger, my clothes were in shreds. Our house was torn down and they took everything to the collective farm. Only a pile of clay remained. And there is no trace of my family — not a grave, nor a cross. There are only these names: my father — Makar Solovyschuk, died May 1933; my mother — Oliana Solovyschuk, died March 1933; my brother — Ivan Solovyschuk, died April 1933; my sister — Motrya Solovyschuk, died April 1933.
Here's what Walter Duranty said in June of that year: "The 'famine' is mostly bunk."
To be fair, the board's argument is not without some logic.
In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the Board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931...In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, fall seriously short....
But what can the board mean by "today's" standards? The distortions, cursory research, and rehashed propaganda that characterized so much of Duranty's work even prior to the famine were a disgrace to journalism — then just as much as now.
The board adds that there was "not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that standard."
Quite how those circumstances are "different" isn't explained. Are we meant to believe that it was perhaps reasonable in those days to expect that the Five-Year Plan would be buttressed by a Pulitzer Prize-winning lie or two? The board does not say. As for trying to justify its inaction on the grounds that "all the principals are dead and unable to respond," let's just say that's an unfortunate choice of words in the context of a horror that left five, six or seven million (Khrushchev: "No one was counting") dead and, thus, one might agree, "unable to respond."
But the argument (with which I have some sympathy) that, however repellent they were, the events of 1932-33 should be irrelevant in considering a prize won for writings that predate them, can only be taken so far. Duranty's behavior in those later years is certainly relevant in coming to an assessment as to whether the flaws in his prizewinning work were the product of a deliberate piece of deception. And the evidence from 1933 is clear. Duranty was a liar. And if he was a liar in 1933, it's probable that he was a liar in 1931.
To make things worse, not only may Duranty have been lying, but also the New York Times may have known that he was lying. One historian has pointed to State Department papers recording a 1931 (note the date) conversation between Duranty and a U.S. diplomat in Berlin suggesting that there was an "understanding" between the New York Times and the Soviet authorities that Duranty's dispatches always reflected the official opinion of the Soviet regime rather than his own point of view.
Now, Duranty could have been lying about that too, or the diplomat could have misunderstood what he was being told, but, like so much of this story, it raises issues that need airing in something more than one brief press release. As the body responsible for administering journalism's most prestigious prize, the Pulitzer board ought to be advocates of openness and disclosure. We are told that it considered this matter for over six months of "study and deliberation." Assuming this is true, the board should publish its findings in full.
But if the Pulitzer Prize board can, in theory at least, make a respectable case for leaving the prize in Hell with Duranty's ghost, the New York Times, usually so exquisitely sensitive to the injustices of the past, is on less certain ground. To be sure, over time it has distanced itself from its former Moscow correspondent, but not (apart for some rather feeble cosmetic gestures) from his Pulitzer.
In response to the latest campaign to revoke the prize, earlier this year the New York Times commissioned Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen to review Duranty's work. He turned out to be no fan of a man who, the New York Times once said, had been on perhaps "the most important assignment ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable period of time." In the report, von Hagen describes Duranty's work from 1931, for example, as a "dull and largely uncritical" recitation of Soviet sources, but the report itself contains no final recommendation. Subsequently, however, von Hagen has argued that the prize should be withdrawn for the sake of the gray lady's "honor."
Honor? Well, when it comes to accepting responsibility for Duranty, the New York Times (usually so eager to be seen as being on the side of the angels) has always tended to be a little reticent, so perhaps it is no surprise that its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., seemed a touch unwilling to go quite as far as his historian. Oh yes, he did what he had to. He dutifully forwarded von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer board. He even sent a cover letter with it in which he condescended to "respect" whatever the board might choose to decide, but he just couldn't resist adding the thought that rescinding Duranty's prize evoked the old Stalinist practice of "airbrush[ing] purged figures out of official records and histories," a view, interestingly, that von Hagen does not share.
Sadly for Pinch and his paper, any airbrushing would likely to be ineffective anyway. Whatever was finally decided, the controversies of recent years have ensured that the historical record will always be clear. The 1932 Pulitzer, the prize about which the New York Times was so proud for so long, was won by a liar and a fraud, won by a journalist to whom genocide was not news that was fit to print, won by a journalist who by his silence made his newspaper an accomplice to mass murder.
If I were Arthur Sulzberger Jr., I would have begged them to take that prize away.
http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford200311240920.asp
figures....the NYT was ballsdeep into it way back then and now, LOL
Unfortunately, the fact that he's a lefty hero is exactly why his prize will never be revoked.
It's a badge of shame for the NY Times that will never be eradicated, whether they revoke the prize or not.
Frankly, the Pulitzer Prize means nothing. It's an incestuous pat on the back by leftist journalists to other leftist journalists. I can think of a rude term for it, but this is a family forum.
The Sulzbergers went to Columbia and are very influential with the university. They have long been on its board. The Columbia School of Journalism wants above anything else to get NY Times jobs for its staff. Faculty and journalists exchange roles in their professional careers. So they will continue to butter each other up and cover up any embarrassing little problems.
After all these years and after all that has been revealed, there are still leftists who consider it a sacred mission to cover up for Stalin.
Good old Uncle Joe. I think the Times is still nostalgic for the old days.
There are several reviews of the book, "Harvest Of Sorrow" by Robert Conquest at the web site:
http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Sorrow-Soviet-Collectivization-Terror-Famine/dp/0195051807
Here is one of those reviews:
Robert Conquest has endured the slurs of the Communist Left in America and Europe as he continues to recall history as a way to chronicle the fight for individual liberty. History will extol his virtues far more than present day academics or big media worthies ever will. This story of inhumane cruelty, perpetrated by Bolshevik ideologues, is so horrible that one wants to suspend disbelief at the turn of every page in every chapter. The complete disregard for the Kulaks by the Bolsheviks at the expense of achieving an ideal should be a lesson for us all. This story should be on the History Channel every week like the stories of German concentration camps. The sheer numbers of genocidal killing show this crime to be even bigger than the holocaust.
Conquest details this horror, chapter and verse, of Stalin's collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine. He shows the Communist ideal for what it is, a fraud, and this is why we don't see this event chronicled on a weekly basis. We have too many people in the media in America who are seemingly ignorant, or who wish to turn their heads to the truth, of what actually happened. We still have the "Walter Duranty types" among us who would seek to distribute misinformation to the public in order to keep the collectivist ideal alive. It makes you wonder what it takes for people to get the message?
This book points out how Duranty was given a Pulitzer Prize for his misreporting from the Soviet Union, in the early 30's, that the famine and genocide in the Ukraine were virtually non-existent. That this cur and toady of Stalin, for 14 years the voice to America from Moscow, has not had his Pulitzer prize retroactively recalled tells you something about those who award the Pulitzer prize. This prize is clearly a very bad and a very sick joke.
If the Irish think their potato famine was a tragedy, which it certainly was, and they thump their chest at the English, which they certainly do, what do they have to say about the Bolshevik's slaughter of the Kulak's? One would think that all people of all nations would band together to denounce such inhumane treatment of mankind by a concentrated number of ideological zealots as described in this book.
This is a very sad story that is very trying to read. It's like reading Valladares' book "Against All Hope" which is about Cuba under Castro. A more comprehensive book would be "The Black Book of Communism" which also includes information about this Soviet caused famine in the Ukraine. It also includes the plight of people, in all of the other countries that are or have been under the yoke of Communist dictators. Their methods of societal control are identical to those chronicled in this book; the mind reels at the numbers of the dead, ...7 million... 11 million... 14 million? It's just too much to believe. This holocaust should never be forgotten. It should be taught as a required course for college graduation. Why isn't it?
Reviewer: Eugene A Jewett "Eugene A Jewett" (Alexandria, Va. United States)
one analogy of the russian revolution to present-day America is that the lefty (but chump) democrat base have been turned into (figuratively, for now) peasants with pitchforks/proletariat....and their allegedly "pluralist" leaders in govt, media, universities, and hollywood will quickly change to bolshevik once they have no further need for the proletariat true-believers.
then there's this problem with global jihad, too.
http://www.califmall.com/Cliff05.html
I wish someone could enlarge this pic, which is the original of an old album cover.....Shangrenade, Harvey Mandel......I had this album way back then and was fascinated with the cover more than the music........
Duranty's smoking gun
http://ucca.org/famine/gordondispatch.html
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