As a shareholder in the New York Times Company, I rejoiced to learn from the Associated Press: “Amid a devastating reporting scandal in which two top editors have resigned, the New York Times faces the possible loss of its 1932 Pulitzer Prize.
“Times reporter Walter Duranty won the award more than 70 years ago for his reporting on the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin’s communist regime.
“In April, however, a Pulitzer committee launched a review of Duranty’s work after Ukrainian groups worldwide complained he deliberately ignored the forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions.”
Actually, as detailed in the book “Stalin’s Apologist,” Duranty, New York Times Moscow correspondent emphatically denied any such Stalinist mass murders, for which British correspondent Malcolm Muggeridge called Duranty “the worst liar in the history of journalism.”
That apparently has made much too little a difference to the New York Times Company.
At one shareholders’ meeting I asked (then) publisher Arthur (“Punch”) Sulzberger why this monumental liar Duranty’s framed photograph is on the wall of the Times’ hall of fame of Pulitzer winners. “Punch” was both courteous and concerned.
He arranged for me to tour the hall, and later told me that under Duranty’s picture a plaque had been installed reading “Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage.”
That was surely not enough – that and the Times’ counting Duranty among all their Pulitzer winners about which they annually brag.
When at a later Times shareholders’ meeting, I asked about this again – of new publisher Arthur (“Pinch”) Sulzberger – this young man was totally rude and resistant.
In the Pulitzer Prize’s 86 years of existence, no prize has been revoked, the AP reported – although the Washington Post surrendered Janet Cooke’s 1991 award after she admitted writing a series about an 8-year-old heroin addict who didn’t exist. The Post failed, however, to fire editor Ben Bradlee who allowed these days of lies into the print of the Washington Post.
Michael Sawkiw Jr., president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, said more than 15,000 post cards, and thousands more letters and e-mails, were sent to the Pulitzer board.
“Exactly like Jayson Blair, the heart of all this is journalistic integrity and ethics,” said Sawkiw.
For denying Stalin’s mass murder of Ukrainians, Duranty of the New York Times was given exclusive interviews with this dictator, and accompanied Molotov to Washington in 1933 when President Roosevelt extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.
That the New York Times has refused to repudiate Duranty’s Pulitzer – as the Washington Post sent back their lying reporter Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer – is a continuing American journalistic outrage.
If New York Times publisher “Pinch” decides not to repudiate Duranty’s Pulitzer and stop the annual bragging with Duranty as one of the Pulitzer recipients, young Sulzberger should be forced to resign, just as he (finally) forced the resignation of editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd.
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