Posted on 03/22/2006 1:25:23 PM PST by montyspython
Former NY Times Reporter: '93 Pulitzer Should Be Revoked
By Sherrie Gossett
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
March 22, 2006
Washington (CNSNews.com) - Castigating the press for "journalistic crimes" committed during its reporting on the Balkans wars of the 1990s, retired New York Times reporter David Binder claims the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting awarded to both the Times and New York's Newsday "should, in all fairness and honesty, be revoked."
Binder was speaking at a press conference for the release of a new book criticizing the war reporting. Binder wrote the foreword to the book by Peter Brock, titled "Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia."
"What we're looking at here is a series catalogued by Peter Brock of journalistic crimes," said Binder. Before mentioning the reporting of the Times' John F. Burns and Newsday's Roy Gutman, Binder evoked the memory of what he called Walter Duranty's "phony reporting" for the New York Times in the 1930s as an example of an undeserved Pulitzer. Duranty was criticized for having been too deferential to Joseph Stalin and his plan to industrialize the Soviet Union.
"What Peter [Brock] has unraveled and disclosed in this book involves at least a couple of Pulitzer prizes that should in all fairness and honesty be revoked." Binder confirmed to Cybercast News Service that he was referring to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, awarded to Burns of the New York Times and Gutman of Newsday for their reporting in the Balkans. Brock devotes considerable space in his book to criticizing the reporting of Burns and Gutman.
Binder noted that the Times has gone through "agony" in recent years over the "terrible professional behavior of its staff members" and with "what has gone on under its masthead."
"[E]xposure is the best remedy," said Binder.
"I think Peter Brock's book helps a great deal to confront these egregious crimes of journalism. I think it should be shoved under the noses of editors all across the press, at least the editors who are dealing with foreign news ..." said Binder.
The Pulitzer Board at first voted to award the prize solely to Gutman, according to Binder. "The New York Times got so agitated that John Burns was passed over that they started lobbying the board. The Pulitzer is an extremely political award in many if not all cases. There are all kinds of backstage manipulations that go on."
The centerpiece of Burns' Pulitzer entry was a seven-hour interview with a captured Bosnian Serb -- Borislav Herak -- who in graphic statements to Burns, confessed to dozens of murders, including eight involving rape. Burns' Nov. 27, 1992, article was described by the New York Times as offering "insight into the way thousands of others have died in Bosnia."
However, more than three years after the publication of Burns' story, the Times on Jan. 31, 1996, described Herak as "slightly retarded" and reported that Herak had retracted his confession and claimed it had been beaten out of him by guards.
"I was tortured, forced to confess," said Herak. By that time his testimony already had been used to convict Sretko Damjanovic for the killing of two Muslim brothers who were later found alive. Both Herak and Damjanovic, who also said he had been "tortured" into providing a false confession, were sentenced to death by firing squad.
Author Peter Brock described Burns' interview with Herak as "a manipulated confession and interrogation in which Burns was the key participant." Brock faults Burns for failing to tell readers that the interview took place with a Sarajevo video production crew present and that "interrogations were conducted by [government] investigators and by Sarajevo film director Ademir Kenovic."
He also argues that "vital pieces" of Herak's story were missing. "[T]here was no evidence, corpses or victims, or eyewitnesses to implicate Herak, except for hearsay from Bosnian government 'investigators,'" Brock writes.
Brock also faults Newsday's Roy Gutman for being unduly influenced by government propagandists including one source who operated under four different aliases. Gutman was criticized for not exercising enough scrutiny before repeating allegations of atrocities and statistics of the dead and tortured.
Gutman won his Pulitzer partly for "electrifying stories about 'concentration camps'," notes Brock, who criticizes the reporter for the prominence of "hearsay" and "double hearsay" in his stories, as well as gratuitous use of the language of the Nazi Holocaust.
Gutman's first five stories about the alleged Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia were actually filed from Zagreb, in Croatia, Brock complains. It was Gutman's sixth story on the subject that finally carried an Omarska dateline, Brock wrote, and that was after the prison had been shut down.
Both Binder and Brock accuse the press of falling into "pack journalism" and playing the role of "co-belligerent." The reliance on Croat and Bosnian Muslim propaganda resulted in distorted reporting that exaggerated the Serb role in the three-sided conflict and ignored ethnic cleansing of Serbs, according to Binder and Brock.
Brock went so far as to say the $3,000 Pulitzer Prize money awarded to Burns and Gutman was "blood money."
"What we're talking about in terms of what I call crimes of journalism was only ten years ago," said Binder. "It wasn't so long ago that these, I think revolting things, were happening -- revolting bias, revolting suppression of other sides of the story."
During his recent appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Binder said it would take "at least a decade" before historians "clear out that wretched underbrush of lies and concoctions" from "despicable" politicians "like Richard Holbrooke," an international negotiator during the administration of former President Bill Clinton and "certainly the journalists" criticized in Brock's book. The rise of blogs and media watchdog groups offers a "corrective" for the public now, Binder contended.
In his call for the revocation of the Pulitzer Prize Peter Brock said that "in all fairness, if [the Pulitzer board] is not going to revoke the prize, they ought to give Janet Cooke's Pulitzer back." Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for a fabricated 1980 story about an eight-year old heroin addict.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there had been no reaction from either the New York Times or Newsday to Cybercast News Service's several requests for comment related to this article.
BTTT.
Oh, WOW!
Besides that money, (thanks for telling us about it), how much money did the Opecker Princes and thugs give Clinton and the Nato Pukes to do what they did.
"A big chunk of the business came in 1995, when troops were sent to Bosnia. The Army paid Brown & Root Services, a subsidiary of Halliburton, $546 million to provide logistical support for more than 20,000 American soldiers in Bosnia, Croatia, and Hungary. The company had already earned $269 million on the contract. Two years later Brown & Root received a sole-source contract worth $405 million to continue support services in Bosnia. Last year [1999] the company won a five-year Army contract to support US peacekeeping troops in the Balkans."
Americans were caught off guard. I'm still mad about the possible phony testimony before congress about babies in incubators in Kuwait and Gulf War I.
Look what we have gotten ourselves into.
Americans unfortunately are slow to learn. Emotional stories (or better still, pictures) convey a message no priest, minister or rabbi ever could -- or would: "Let's go kick those b_st_rds' _sses!"
I don't like false news stories, but when government officials tell out-and-out lies that are unchallenged by the press we are really in bad shape. I recall a certain American general in charge of NATO in the late '90s telling some whoppers that led to air strikes against Serbia and our taking the side of the KLA in the war in Kosovo.
We can be thankful he never made it into the White House.
" Americans were caught off guard. I'm still mad about the possible phony testimony before congress about babies in incubators in Kuwait and Gulf War I.
Look what we have gotten ourselves into."
Thank you Peter Arnett, for the post.
You're most welcome. Was it phony or not? Would you care to address that? BTW I am not Peter Arnett and generally support Bush, but I am against lies; I don't care who is telling them or selling them.
"Look what we have gotten ourselves into."
What part of ground zero is a lie?
None that I know of. I'm not talking about ground zero. That has nothing to do with the first gulf war and how we got into it. Saddam is/was bad. He invaded Kuwait. In hindsight, I don't know what the answer is. Anybody can see that we have gotten ourselves in a mess. How I wish we could have avoided Iraq (and the Balkan war) in the first place.
That being said, I want to see us come through this on the other side, see the thing through, hope the opposition doesn't completely ruin all our efforts thus far, but at the same time I know many more American lives are going to be sacrificed and changed in the process. I do not believe Bush has committed an impeachable offense, but his support is eroding, and I'm worried about the next elections because a lot, lot else is at stake.
You didn't address my point about the Kuwaiti testifying before congress. It's best that we not discuss it any more.
It was, as if just the fact that "Saddam insane" had had his troops invade Kuwait was NOT enough to get the US and her allies to push them back out.
That gal had to MAKE up stuff, unnecessarily. See what we mean.
thanks for the ping!
note to self: read later
p.s. find that Algore speech!! teehee!
FYI!
As a matter of background, the Sulzbergers have had a very long and close connection with Columbia University. They attended the university. They are donors. The have a close connection with the Columbia School of Journalism, and hire some of its graduates.
For many, many years they refused to write a positive story about New York University, even when there was a big news story, because they didn't want to help Columbia's competition. (That one point finally changed, but they are still biased toward Columbia.)
Naturally they get plenty of Pulitzers, because there are all sorts of incestuous connections with the people on the Pulitzer Prize Committee. It's a very cozy backscratching club.
LOL, that's so funny to see all of a sudden - the flasher!
bump
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