New York Times Life-Long Romance With Communism

If I were the gatekeeper for who gets good or bad repute, I would want to give myself a good one under the auspice of modesty. Would not the newspaper of record, the New York Times, do the same? As is oft said, truth is sometimes too bizarre to be fabricated. And truth must be told as simply and as boldly as possible.

We all studied history in school. If we were lucky, we had interest, a good textbook, and a non-boring teacher. But even if we had these three magic ingredients, we couldn’t possibly know what is not directly revealed in the history books. How could we read between lines that were not printed?

All this came to mind as I pondered when the New York Times might have lost their way as the newspaper of record – the former noble journalist paradise where fact, not worldview, agenda, and spin ruled. As I revisited history anew, I began to doubt the New York Times ever truly earned such acclaimed magnanimity. It was obvious from my inquiry how powerful the pen was to change the world long before it was digitized. That sort of power and human nature has always been bad bedfellows.

Rewind to 1932 when Walter Duranty, who served as the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, received the Pulitzer Prize for his series of favorable reports on the Soviet Union. If you don’t remember or were asleep during history classes, the Soviet Union was communist.

Walter Duranty met an idealistic journalist by the name of Gareth Jones. Jones went to Moscow to interview Palin. He had many questions, but the main question was how Moscow was paying for it all. Simply, the numbers didn’t add up. Duranty tried to discourage Jones, but Jones would not be thwarted.

Jones snuck out to Ukraine to see for himself how Stalin's experiment was going. What he did not expect to find was a mass famine in which nearly four million people died – 3.9 million deaths!

Jones was released to leave the country having been thought to be under the employ of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Before he left, he was blackmailed by Russian officials and encouraged by Duranty to paint a positive picture when he returned to the U.S. But Jones did not, he told the truth about what he saw. He was then banned from Russia.

Duranty ravaged Jones' story and reputation, and as the news goes, after one does, they all do. But Jones found a reputable paper to print his story anonymously, which went down in infamy as Holodomor, the great Stalin Famine. Duranty, referred to later as Stalin’s Apologist, was the main influential key to President Roosevelt’s decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union.

But Duranty wasn’t alone in his favorable views of Russia. The romance with communism was already afoot at the New York Times and others - despite the famine. The view was along with the thinking that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Consequently, many reporters slanted their coverage in favor of the Soviet Union. This romance and the slanted reporting remain alive and well today. The difference with contemporary reporting is that it has gone beyond slant and bias. It has become an agenda and it slimes along the road to pure propaganda.

Calls for revoking Duranty’s Pulitzer went on for many years but never came to fruition. The New York Times stood by Duranty for nearly 60 years. Duranty enjoyed a long and prosperous life. Jones on the other hand, was murdered not long after the truth of Holodomor was revealed.

One has to stop and think for a moment about the New York Times favorable view of communism, which seems to have survived a century, and their complacency then with the millions of deaths of Holodomor.

Danger has always been the risk of truthful investigative journalism. We all have come to know that. What differs today is that danger seems to have shifted from journalists to readers.

https://www.history.com/news/ukrainian-famine-stalin

 

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