'32 Times Pulitzer could be yanked

New York Daily News ^ | 6/11/03 | PAUL D. COLFORD

[kattracks]

More than 70 years later, a Pulitzer Prize won by a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times is being reconsidered.

A subcommittee of the Pulitzer board is reviewing the 1932 award won by Walter Duranty, an admirer of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Specifically, the board said yesterday, it is responding to complaints from those who want the Pulitzer revoked.

Duranty earned the prize for stories about the Soviet dictator's five-year plan that were published in 1931 - before millions perished in the Stalin-engineered famine that ravaged Ukraine. Duranty denied in reports for The Times that there was a famine.

Thousands of letters, E-mails and preprinted postcards have been sent to the Pulitzer board in a campaign begun early this year by Ukrainian groups in the U.S. and abroad.

The board said it's "aware of the most recent complaints and, like any significant complaint, we take them seriously."

"I'm very happy with the decision," said retired educator Myron Kuropas, a member of the Ukrainian National Association who said he distributed 1,000 postcards around the country from his home in DeKalb, Ill. "They should have done this years and years ago."

"If he was lying in '32 and '33, surely he was lying earlier," Kuropas said.

According to Pulitzer administrator Sig Gissler, the board agreed to review the Duranty case in early April - before The Times was jolted by the Jayson Blair reporting scandal.

In 1990, the panel said yesterday, it decided unanimously against withdrawing a prize "awarded in a different era and under different circumstances."

Echoing that decision yesterday, The Times said, "In that situation, The Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history."

However, the paper has renounced Duranty's work through the years. A 1990 editorial called his dispatches from Moscow "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."

Originally published on June 11, 2003

[MEG33]

Dark days of journalism and the idealistic hopes for the perfect answer to all the world's problems spread like a disease.It lurks in the left today.

[DPB101]

Has anyone found the article for which Duranty won the Pulitzer?

[MEG33]

I googled briefly.It was a series about the soviet economy.The real outrage occurred when he covered up,denied,was an apologist for the famine and other atrocities the "economy "caused.Did not find the articles.

[DPB101]

Thanks. Somebody will find it eventually. Check out Louis Fischer--an even worse apologist for mass murder than Duranty. Fischer ended up teaching at Princeton.

[hometoroost]

So Jayson Blair can say he was just following the family tradition of the NY Times. The more things change the more they remain the same.

[MEG33]

The title "The God That Failed" caught my eye for true believers in communism and it's historical revelations it must be a very disillusioning experience to see it's failure to live up to the billing!

[MEG33]

Except among the elites,no one has the power to influence our whole view of the world like they did years ago.There are biases in mainstream media that are finally being challenged here.Papers are having to correct mistakes and lies because there are savvy people on their case!It won't ever be perfect but we are feeling more confident of finding the truth...even if it takes time.

[Savage Beast]

"The Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history."

Uh...maybe you'd better rethink that one.

"some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."

And that's saying a hellyva lot.

[Savage Beast]

So much for that "newspaper of record" shtik.

[kattracks]

"In that situation, The Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history."

Even though that "history" was created under false pretenses.

[DPB101]

What frosts me is that writers from The Nation appear on TV and no one ever calls them on the history of their publication. Fischer was friends with the Wolf family in East Germany for crying out loud. He denied a genocide which killed over 7 million people. I.F. Stone, another Nation writer, was a KGB agent himself.

[Lazamataz]

So much for that "newspaper of record" shtik.

All the News That's Fit to Print That's Misreported and Lied About Until It Fits Our Far-Left Agenda.

[Basil Duke]

Duranty was the Stalin shill who coined the phrase "You can't make an omlet without breaking a few eggs." That was his quaint way of dismissing the millions of people deliberately starved to death in the Kulak/Ukraine famine of the early '30s.

[MEG33]

Thanks for the info.Katrina VanderHoohoo is so anti Bush I cannot watch.I loved Hitchens goodbye to the Nation.

[MEG33]

I learn something everyday on FR. Thanks for the history.Terrible statement in light of the deaths in the millions.

[DPB101]

Full text of Duranty's 1933 New York Times dispatch from Moscow bashing Gareth Jones for telling the truth about death in the Ukraine:

Russians Hungry, Not Starving

Jones' rebuttal of Duranty and articles by Malcolm Muggeridge on the genocide are here.

Stuart Kahan in "The Wolf of the Kremlin" writes how Kaganovich, the man Stalin called "My Himmler" was encouraged by articles in the New York Times:

He (Kaganovich) now saw himself being quoted more and more in Pravda, and then in a Polish paper and even in an article from Paris, and finally his name appeared in the prestigious New York Times. ...

He looked again at The New York Times of January 2, 1931, and he was pleased with what he read. He was referred to as "a new and energetic member of the Communist Party Politburo."

The papers were full of Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich. He was delighted when the staid New York Times once again spoke of him in long articles:

The reputation of Lazar M. Kaganovich, for conceiving largescale projects and accomplishing [sic] in Russia, almost overshadows that of Joseph Stalin himself . Mr. Kaganovich is credited with having originated the idea of machine-tractor stations, dominated by Commissar agents, for guiding the collectivized peasants, stimulating the agricultural output, and, in brief, consolidating the "agricultural revolution" effect by collectivization. ...

[Grampa Dave]

One can only hope that this happens.

Then a hard look at all undocumented sources and possible lies in the left wing media needs to be looked at for 7 decades.

[MEG33]

And there is the "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs quote".

[DPB101]

Slick piece of propaganda by Duranty, wasn't it? Clintonesque. Maureen Dowdyish. Krugman-like. Questioning Jones' credentials, distracting attention by bringing up reports in the past (which Jones did not write) that had been proven incorrect, claiming Jones predicted things (the USSR would collapse) he did not--all written in a sneering, pseudo-intellectual and patronizing manner. Classic New York Times. Nothing has changed.