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drops at NY Times
Clunk. 1932 Pulitzer Prize may be yanked.
Plagiarism. Favoritism. Abetting a genocide. What will those no-goodniks at the Times get up to next?
Hardly has Howell Raines’ swivel chair begun to cool when the nation’s foremost daily finds itself once again embroiled in scandal -- one with deep historical implications.
The culprit this time is a journalist of far greater renown than Jayson Blair or Rick Bragg, if also somewhat more dead: famed foreign correspondent Walter Duranty.
The Pulitzer Prize Board is looking into whether to revoke Duranty's 1932 award for coverage of Stalin-era Soviet society.
The charge is that Duranty, who reported from Moscow from 1922 to 1941, willfully ignored evidence that Stalin's policies were responsible for a famine that killed up to 7 million Ukrainians in the 1930s.
According to a 1990 biography, Duranty knew about the famine but neglected to report on it, aware that to do so might jeopardize his warm relations with Stalin.
While some argue that Duranty's Bolshevist sympathies place him smack in the middle of journalism's mainstream, others contend that by cozying up to the dictator and allegedly transcribing his propaganda verbatim, Duranty may have failed to meet his profession's standard of objectivity.
The Pulitzer people note that Duranty was given the award in 1932, reflecting his work of the prior year, before the famine began.
The Pulitzer commission, which upheld Duranty's award in an earlier review, opened a second inquiry in April at the behest of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which seeks to mark the 70th anniversary of the tragedy.
One must ponder, 70 years later, what service to journalism the revocation of Duranty's prize would serve, or how the Pulitzer people might put their summer to better use.
In any case, assessing the Times' mug lineup of wayward journalists suddenly becomes a more complex business.
We have Blair, who plagiarized and fabricated portions of his Times articles, then Bragg, who relied over-much on the services of an unpaid freelance assistant, and now Duranty, who in his award-winning writings failed to note properly a famine that had not then begun.
It makes us yearn for the the return of Howell Raines, who saw objectivity when he knew it.
June 11, 2003© 2003 Media Life
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