Posted on 06/07/2007 12:35:29 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
How the New York Times Traded Journalistic Integrity for Vodka and Caviar
Those of us who read the New York Times regularly have been shocked by what can be at best described as pro Kremlin reporting or at worst, a case of outright journalistic fraud.
The New York Times first caught my attention with their January 25, 2007 article: TALLINN JOURNAL; Debate Renewed: Did Moscow Free Estonia or Occupy It? Penned by their Moscow correspondent, Steven Lee Myers, the article makes no reference to the fact that it was the official policy of the United States (and other democratic states) NOT to recognize (the forcible) incorporation Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union. To add insult to injury, according to the article, there is a “debate”, whether Moscow “freed” Estonia! And, the article makes no reference to the atrocities committed by the Soviet occupation forces in Estonia or other Baltic states. As a matter of fact, when the Russian “liberators” took my grandfather in 1949(together with at least another 30,000 Estonians) to a Soviet Russian concentration camp, the GULAG, one of the popular slogans that might have greeted him was ‘Through Labor – Freedom’ (Ferguson, War of the World, New York, Penguin 2006).
Myers’ article somehow sees the removal of a Russian army memorial as unnecessary and controversial. For us, Estonians, the memorial – the Bronze Soldier, symbolizes the atrocities committed by the Russian troops and the occupation authorities. The most recent on the long list of crimes against humanity (the Russian occupation lasted over 50 years), was the attack on peaceful demonstrators at the Vilnius television tower, on January 13, 1991. As the attached photograph shows, the unarmed demonstrators try in vain to hold back a Russian (occupation army) tank. A leg is showing from under the tank, as one of the demonstrators has already been crushed. Fifteen people “were freed of their lives” as a result of this episode.
Of course both Myers and the New York Times do know these facts well. On July 24, 1940 an editorial in the New York Times itself declared:
Under-Secretary of State [Sumner] Welles did not overstate the case yesterday when he spoke of the “predatory” manner in which the Soviet Russia has absorbed the three small Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The spokesmen of the workers’ paradise whose capital is Moscow are tireless in announcing their discovery of new and higher standards of international morality. Their methods remain the methods of the gunman. (The New York Times, July 24, 1940, at 20, col. 3)
So sixty seven years ago there was no debate, and now, suddenly “debate renewed”??? Why is the New York Times publishing such nonsense?
As Yogi Berra said, “This is like déjà vu all over again”. For background, in 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine in the Ukraine, where around 7 million Ukrainians, deemed “enemies of the people” starved to death. The Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, at the time, was Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Price winner. At the height of the famine, Duranty reported (from the Ukraine) that “village markets [were] flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables and butter… A child can see that this is not a famine but abundance” Privately, however, Duranty admitted to the British Embassy officials in Moscow that “the Ukraine had been bled white [and] the peasants were ‘double-crossed’ by the government”. (S.J. Taylor, Stalin`s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow, Oxford University Press, 1990)
Taylor further reports that Duranty appears to have been well rewarded by the Soviets - “His four room apartment was stocked with vodka and caviar, he employed a chauffeur, a maid and a cook (who became his mistress).”
Even a stronger proof of Duranty’s and the New York Times’ ethical lapse is given in US Intelligence Perceptions of Soviet Power 1921 – 1946, by Leonard Leshuk, London, Routledge, 2002. Leshuk writes: “in June 1931, Duranty admitted to A. W. Kleiforth of the US Embassy in Berlin that ‘in agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities, his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own.”
Perhaps even today, the New York Times and Steven Lee Meyers believe (like Duranty did) that access to the Kremlin officials is more important than journalistic integrity?
The durantiesque quality of the New York Times’ recent reporting seems to support this hypothesis. On May 29, 2007, an article appeared under the heading: Digital Fears Emerge after Data Siege in Estonia. Naturally, the New York Times does not see the role of the Kremlin in orchestrating the cyber attacks. Instead it quotes (the most reliable of all sources!), the Russian government, “who has denied any involvement in the attacks.”
Meanwhile, the Economist, in its May 31, 2007 editorial, How to Fight Back, calls the attacks “state-backed internet terrorism.”
Perhaps the New York Times’ new motto should be “All the Disinformation that’s Profitable to Print!”
Why do you think they call it, “Pravda-on-the-Hudson”?
You always find the good ones, Joe!
Excellent find.
“CaviarThose of us who read the New York Times regularly have been shocked by what can be at best described as pro Kremlin reporting or at worst, a case of outright journalistic fraud.”
Then why the heck read it?!?!?! who is the fool now fool.
I know that phrase entered my consciousness, by my own choice of it before - at least to my memory - I could recall reading it or hearing it anywhere; and then I began to use it and wondered, at the start, if I should and could copyright it.
But, on doing some lengthy searches, I later found that many people, independently, before and since, adopt that appropriate, leftist-party-line label for the old gray lady.
It is probably one of the most accurate “public” labels in American journalism; for who else could so slavishly parrot the party-line of the American Marxists, in America, than “Pravda on the Hudson”, which is why (its domestic editorial positions) the label fits, more than any occasional support for the Soviets or Russia.
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