RAINES IS A SYMPTOM, NOT THE DISEASE (via ef brown)

Analysis: Shame of Duranty's Pulitzer (Martin Sieff, 6/2/2003, UPI)

As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine. [...]

Writing 40 years later in his classic memoirs "Chronicles of Wasted Time," [British journalist Malcolm] Muggeridge concluded that Duranty was a sociopath without a grain of professional integrity or human decency to his name. He described Duranty as "a little, sharp-witted, energetic man" who liked "to hint at aristocratic connections and classical learning, of which, I must say, he produced little evidence. One of his legs had been amputated after a train accident, but he was very agile at getting about with an artificial one."

Duranty may well have been blackmailed or bribed or both by the Soviets, but Muggeridge concluded that his real motive in lying outright about what he knew to be true and helping the Soviets in their unprecedented, astonishingly successful cover-up was a far simpler one: He loved and revered Stalin precisely because he was so colossally murderous and cruel.

"He admired Stalin and the regime precisely because they were so strong and ruthless. 'I put my money on Stalin' was one of his favorite sayings.'" Indeed, Muggeridge related that in one conversation they had, Duranty even admitted to him that he knew there was a catastrophic food shortage, even famine in Ukraine and that he knew the Soviet authorities were prepared to kill large numbers of people there to keep control.

As Muggeridge described the conversation, "But, he said, banging the sides of the sofa, remember that you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs -- another favorite saying. They'll win, he went on; they're bound to win. If necessary, they'll harness the peasants to the ploughs but I tell you they'll get the harvest in and feed the people that matter. The people that mattered were the men in the Kremlin and their underlings. ... The others were just serfs, reserves of the proletariat, as Stalin called them. Some would die, surely, perhaps, quite a lot, but there were enough, and to spare."

An appalled and a fascinated Muggeridge listened to all this and later recalled, "I had the feeling, listening to this outburst, that in thus justifying Soviet brutality and ruthlessness, Duranty was in someway getting his own back for being small, and losing a leg, and not having the aristocratic lineage ... he claimed to have. ... Duranty was a little browbeaten boy looking up admiringly at a big bully."

In his own lifetime -- he lived to the age of 73, though he died broke and forgotten -- Duranty was never called to account. Indeed, as Muggeridge also noted, "He came to be accepted as the great Russian expert in America, and played a major part in shaping President Roosevelt's policies" towards the Soviet Union.

The Pulitzer Prize board's re-evaluation of Duranty's award therefore comes late in the day, to put it mildly, but it is still a welcome, indeed necessary gesture towards American journalistic integrity and to the hecatombs of dead whose cries were hushed.

An organization with even just a tiny shred of honor would have apologized for the credibility its pages lent to Duranty and plead with the Pulitzer
people to revoke it, something which, to the best of my knowledge the Times has never done. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 5, 2003 7:42 PM