A Stalinist Propagandist
After his own review of Duranty's 1931 work, Columbia professor Von Hagen concluded that Duranty's "analyses" were "very effective renditions of the Stalinist leadership's self-understanding of their murderous and progressive project to defeat the backwardness of Slavic, Asiatic peasant Russia." Duranty "frequently writes in the enthusiastically propagandistic language of his sources…without any ironic distance or critical commentary."
Those sources, Von Hagen writes, are all "official Soviet sources, either newspapers or speeches by the leadership." Von Hagen pronounces Duranty's "uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime" a disservice to the Times and its readers. Based on what he read of Duranty, he wrote that he is not surprised that the reporter would "deny in print the famine of 1932-1933."
The Pulitzer board and the Times also ignored the judgment of Duranty by several of his contemporaries in Moscow. Professor Mace cites the memoirs of Malcolm Muggeridge, who was a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow in the early 1930s. Muggeridge wrote: "I suppose no one-not even Louis Fischer-followed the Party Line, every shift and change, as assiduously as [Duranty] did." His articles were "so ludicrously false that they were a subject of derision among the other correspondents and even [the Soviet censor] had been known to make jokes about them." Muggeridge pronounced Duranty "The greatest liar of any journalist I have known in fifty years of journalism."
Others point to Duranty's own admission that he had lied about the catastrophe in the Ukraine in 1932-33. Despite reports surfacing in the West about the famine, Duranty wrote in 1933 that Russians were hungry, "but not starving." He told his readers that there were "serious food shortages," but "no actual starvation" in the Ukraine. "No death from starvation," he wrote, just "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." But Duranty knew the truth about the situation in Ukraine in 1932-33. In September 1933, Professor Mace reports that Duranty told a British diplomat in Moscow that "it is possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from the lack of food in the Soviet Union in the past year," and "The Ukraine has been bled white." In his 1949 memoir, he would write, "Whatever Stalin's apologists may say, 1932 was a year of famine in Russia." As Andrew Stuttaford concluded in National Review Online: "the evidence from 1933 is clear. Duranty was a liar. And if he was a liar in 1933, it's probable that he was a liar in 1931."
Duranty's motivations have been the subject of speculation for years; some believe that he was richly rewarded by the Soviets and he was said to have lived lavishly during his stay in Moscow. Some have speculated that Soviet intelligence agents blackmailed him; he is reported to have been a sexual deviant. Others have speculated that he was on the Soviet government's payroll, but no evidence of that has yet emerged from Soviet archives.
Another of his contemporaries, the socialist Eugene Lyons, wrote that "access" to key power brokers, especially Stalin and other high-ranking officials, is the most likely explanation for Duranty's lies. Lyons wrote, "The real medium of exchange in Moscow, buying that which neither rubles nor dollars can touch, was power." Access to that power offered "inducements [that] are more effective in bridling a correspondent's tongue than any threats…Whether in Moscow or Berlin, Tokyo or Rome, all the temptations for a practicing reporter are in the direction of conformity."
To update Lyons, we could add Baghdad or Havana to that list. Like Duranty in an earlier day, foreign correspondents deliberately shaded the truth about Saddam Hussein in their coverage of Iraq. CNN is usually cited as the most blatant offender, but emerging accounts also depict the major television networks and newspapers as willing transmitters of Saddam Hussein's propaganda. Beyond the moral blindness of the Pulitzer committee and the New York Times, what makes this story relevant are the disclosures of similar practices by major media outlets in their coverage of Iraq.
On the heels of the Duranty fiasco, the Times has been caught once again smearing the reputation of one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.
Times editorial writer Brent Staples could not resist the opportunity to use the revelation that Strom Thurmond had a black daughter to dredge up discredited allegations that Jefferson had fathered a black son from one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.
In a December 18 column about the Thurmond scandal, he declared that, "The cover-up hatched 200 years ago by Thomas Jefferson's family was blown away a few years back after genetic evidence showed that Jefferson almost certainly fathered Sally Hemings's final son, Eston, born in 1808. This led historians to conclude that Jefferson fathered all of her children in a relationship that lasted more than 35 years."
Changing Allegations
In a July 25, 2003 article, Staples had put it somewhat differently, saying that, "Leading historians who doubted this have done an about-face since genetic evidence linked Jefferson to one Hemings child. There is a growing consensus that Jefferson fathered most, if not all, of Sally's children, just as Madison Hemings claimed in a now-famous newspaper interview published in 1873."
Smearing Thomas Jefferson
These charges are so wild as to constitute a deliberate lie. It is a lie that has been cited by the liberal media for two reasons. One, they wish to smear the reputations of America's founders. And two, the charge serves to excuse or divert attention from the sexual misconduct of one of their favorite liberal presidents, Bill Clinton. But it's just not true. The well-documented book, "The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: an American Travesty" concludes that, contrary to the way the matter has been portrayed by the media, there is no substantial evidence at all to support the charge that Thomas Jefferson had a relationship with Sally Hemings. In fact, the best evidence indicates it never happened, and that his younger brother, Randolph, was the father.
It looks like the Times did not learn its lesson in the Jayson Blair scandal.
In another major embarrassment, the Times also recently published an obituary for veteran dancer and actress Katharine Sergava. But she wasn't dead.
In this case at least, the Times corrected the error.
What You Can Do
Send the enclosed cards or cards and letters of your own choosing to Bill Keller of the New York Times, to Mel Gibson, and to order the book Journalistic Fraud by Bob Kohn.