Of all the foreign corespondents who betrayed their craft with blatant distortions and fabrications, none is more loathsome than the opium-indulging Walter Duranty, The New York Times foreign correspondent in Moscow during Stalin's genocidal destruction of Ukraine's peasantry in 1932-1933. Duranty is the father of the "give them a break" journalistic approach to communism.
It was Duranty who knowingly denied the famine in dispatches to The New York Times with descriptive euphemisms such as "serious food shortage," "mismanagement of collective farming," a conspiracy of "wreckers" and "spoilers" who had "made a mass of Soviet food production" (i.e. poor Ukrainian peasants who resisted collectivization) and the like. "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation," he wrote, "but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." There was suffering, Duranty admitted but "to put it brutally - you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs..."
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2003/100317.shtml