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EDITORIAL: The Famine and The Times
The Ukrainian Weekly; November 25, 2001
This month Ukrainians around the world are observing the solemn anniversary
of the Great Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933. We needn't remind our readers, we
are sure, that the Famine was a deliberate campaign that killed up to 10
million people or that it was indeed genocide.
But perhaps we do need to remind our readers that one of the world's leading
newspapers, The New York Times, has yet to acknowledge its mistake in how it
covered - or more precisely covered up - the famine. At the time famine was
raging in the Ukrainian countryside, The Times' Moscow correspondent, Walter
Duranty, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his "dispassionate interpretive
reporting" from the USSR, filed news reports that denied the famine's
existence, while privately telling British intelligence that he believed
over 10 million people had died.
There have been numerous attempts to get The Times to set the record
straight.
In 1986 a Times shareholder and radio talk show host, Les Kinsolving, asked
Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger if the newspaper would return the
Pulitzer Prize awarded in the 1930s to Duranty, in the light of his
documented cover-up. Mr. Sulzberger replied that, "what we report has to
stand, for better or worse, as our best contemporary effort." While noting
that "perhaps he [Duranty] was too trusting of Soviet sources," the
publisher said, "That contemporary Pulitzer jurors thought him worthy of a
prize for the things he did write from Moscow is a judgment I am neither
equipped nor entitled to second-guess at this date. In any event, it is not
a prize The Times can take back."
In 1987 it was learned that, "in agreement with The New York Times and the
Soviet authorities," the dispatches of Duranty always "reflect(ed) the
official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own." That information,
uncovered in a declassified State Department document - a memorandum written
by a U.S. Embassy staffer in Berlin based on a conversation with Duranty,
was reported by Dr. James Mace at a conference on "Recognition and Denial of
Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century" held by the Institute for the
Study of Genocide. After being sent a photocopy of the memorandum plus Dr.
Mace's paper, Times Executive Editor Max Frankel relayed a response to this
newspaper: Dr. Mace's revelation "doesn't seem to qualify as news. It's
really history, and belongs in history books."
The Times revisited the issue of the famine in June 1990 via an item in "The
Editorial Notebook" titled "Trenchcoats, Then and Now: The Correspondent Who
Liked Stalin." Duranty was "fascinated, almost mesmerized by the harsh
system he described," wrote Karl E. Meyer. "The result was some of the worst
reporting to appear in this newspaper." The item also noted that the Times
correspondent's "lapses" were detailed in the newly released book "Stalin's
Apologist" by S.J. Taylor, who documented "his indifference to the
catastrophic famine ... when millions perished in Ukraine on the heels of
forced collectivization."
"The Editorial Notebook" item may have been a step in the right direction,
but the Times has yet to tell the whole truth. It had an opportunity to set
the record straight in the recently released supplement dedicated to its
150th anniversary. Executive Editor Howell Raines explained in a note to
readers that though the paper's slogan is "All the News That's Fit to
Print," it is "patently flawed. ... important news slips by because our
coverage reflects blind spots that we recognize only in retrospect ... (see
Max Frankel's article on page 10 about our blinkered coverage of the
Holocaust). ...we have not covered every major event with perfect
prescience." Mr. Raines continued: "We know we make mistakes, and we hate
them, but we do not fear them to the point of timidity, as long as they are
made in the course of intellectually honest work and are promptly
corrected."
What then, we ask, is preventing The New York Times from acknowledging its
most grievous mistake from the 1930s and from being intellectually honest
enough to return the Pulitzer that Walter Duranty should never have
received?
The Ukrainian Weekly, November 25, 2001, No. 47, Vol. LXIX
http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/2001/470111.shtml
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