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OPINION By Duncan M. Currie
The Harvard Crimson, The University Daily since 1873
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
In the annals of 20th-century journalism, few names are more ignominious
than Walter Duranty. The New York Times' Moscow correspondent during
the 1920s and 1930s, Duranty was by all accounts a liar, a recycler of
propaganda and a willful apologist for one of history's bloodiest
tyrants, Joseph Stalin.
Back in 1932, however, he was the toast of Western elites, having won a
Pulitzer Prize for 13 articles filed from Russia the previous year.
According to the selection committee, his dispatches were "excellent
examples of the best type of foreign correspondence."
Duranty's prize has long been the subject of intense controversy. Last
spring the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA)
initiated a campaign to urge its revocation by the Pulitzer Prize Board.
After six months of consideration, the board decided on Nov. 21 not to
rescind the prize. It concluded that the pieces in question, while they
fell well below "today's standards for foreign reporting," showed "no
clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception."
The board tacitly acknowledged that Duranty covered up the widespread
Soviet famine of 1932-33, which claimed the lives of several million in
Ukraine alone. But it isolated Duranty's famine-denying articles from
his Pulitzer articles on Stalin's Five-Year Plan. "A Pulitzer Prize for
reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the
author's character," the board explained, "but for the specific pieces
entered in the competition."
This argument is understandable. No matter how odious Duranty's morals
and reprehensible his treatment of the famine-while denying it in print,
he privately told British diplomats in September 1933 that as many as 10
million people had starved to death-the fate of his 1932 prize should
ultimately rest upon the strength of the writing for which it was won.
Yet by any conceivable measure, Duranty's reporting in 1931 was an utter
failure. "It reads like Pravda and Izvestiya in English," historian Mark
von Hagen tells me, citing two of the leading Kremlin press organs of
the time. Von Hagen, Professor of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian
History at Columbia, was commissioned by the Times this summer to
conduct an independent study of Duranty's 1931 coverage of the Soviet
Union.
"Much of the 'factual' material is dull and largely uncritical
recitation of Soviet sources," he wrote in his subsequent eight-page
report, "whereas his efforts at 'analysis' are 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."
Was this propagandizing unintentional, as the Pulitzer Board seemed to
imply? No one can say for sure. But it's hard to imagine that a man who
would spend the next two years deliberately concealing a genocidal
famine was a paragon of integrity in 1931. Moreover, Duranty's sources
were almost exclusively Soviet authorities. Would he really have been
naive enough to trust their veracity so blindly?
In the early 1930s there were few Western correspondents in Russia, and
members of the Pulitzer committee, like most other Americans, would have
deferred to the Times as somewhat authoritative on all matters Soviet.
Many have speculated whether Duranty's editors were aware of the gross
deficiencies in his journalism. Again, it's tough to tell, although
Sally J. Taylor's 1990 book "Stalin's Apologist" alleged that
several editors considered Duranty a Soviet stooge.
Since the publication of Taylor's book, the Times has distanced itself
from Duranty's work. In a review of the book, then-editorial board
member Karl Meyer wrote that Duranty's Soviet pieces represented "some
of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." That same year
(1990), the Times placed a disclaimer next to Duranty's framed picture
in its Pulitzer hallway, noting: "Other writers in The Times and
elsewhere have discredited this coverage." Executive editor Bill Keller
recently told the Washington Post that the 1931 articles were "awful,"
"a parroting of propaganda" and "clearly not prizeworthy."
Even still, in an interview with his own newspaper Keller expressed
unease at the idea of Duranty's Pulitzer being revoked. "As someone who
spent time in the Soviet Union while it still existed," he said, "the
notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps." Publisher
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. also warned the Pulitzer Board against evoking
such a "Stalinist practice." (Neither he nor Keller specified how the
board's rescinding a journalism prize on account of documented fraud was
at all comparable to a Stalinist purge.)
Sulzberger added that the board should avoid "setting a precedent for
revisiting its judgments over many decades." Yet the slippery-slope
argument is not very compelling here. Consider that in December 2002,
Columbia University rescinded Michael Bellesiles's Bancroft Prize after
it was discovered that his award-winning book, "Arming America",
relied on fabricated sources. Were the Pulitzer Board to revoke
Duranty's prize, it would not threaten past Pulitzer winners any more
than the rescinding of Bellesiles's award threatened previous Bancroft
winners.
Bottom line: Duranty's is an extraordinary case of second-hand
propaganda masquerading as real journalism. Rarely, if ever, has a
Western reporter so consistently trumpeted the party line of a brutal
dictatorship. It is perhaps too much to hope that the Times would
voluntarily "return" Duranty's prize, as the Washington Post returned
Janet Cooke's prize in 1981. And yes, no Pulitzer has ever been outright
revoked. But it's hard to fathom another instance where the Pulitzer
Board has, or will, make such an egregious, indisputable error in
judgment.
By passing up a chance to right a seven-decade-old wrong, the board
tarnishes its image. As Canadian academic Lubomyr Luciuk, the
UCCLA's research director, tells me, its members have effectively
"become apologists for Stalin's apologist."
But hey, at least that's better than "airbrushing," right?
Duncan M. Currie '04 is a history concentrator in Leverett House. His
column appears on alternate Wednesdays.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=356569
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