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0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 22, 2003

Byline: John Berlau, INSIGHT

Reeling from a scandal involving alleged plagiarism and false reporting from former star reporter Jayson Blair, the New York Times is relying heavily on its carefully cultivated reputation for decades of integrity and objectivity in reporting. Even though its two top editors resigned in disgrace, Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is telling shareholders and readers that this is a minor blemish for a newspaper that historically has held to the "highest standards of integrity and journalism."

With the famously liberal paper citing its history to try to redeem its image, critics are taking the opportunity to hold the Times accountable for the journalistic crimes of its star foreign correspondent of 70 years ago. They cite the cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winner Walter Duranty of mass murders and other atrocities ordered by Josef Stalin in the former Soviet Union. Despite evidence even the Times does not dispute which shows Duranty knew well that millions were being starved to death at the very time he used the newspaper to deny Stalin's forced Ukrainian famine, the Times has refused to return the prize he won in 1932 for his Soviet reporting. In fact it still displays Duranty's work in an in-house exhibit honoring the paper's Pulitzer Prize winners.

"The Jayson Blair incident really put the Times out there in terms of journalistic integrity of one of its correspondents, and we're looking at this as an inroad into the New York Times to speak about the atrocities Walter Duranty knew about but unfortunately did not write about," says Michael Sawkiw Jr., president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, which has led the drive to convince the Times to return the award and persuade the Pulitzer Prize board to revoke it. "When it comes to journalistic integrity and ethics," Sawkiw says, "anything that is written that undermines those ideals should be categorically denounced, and any prize or honor associated with publication of the offender should be given back."

In the last few months, the Pulitzer board has received thousands of postcards, letters and e-mails from Ukrainian-Americans and others concerned about failure of the Times to come to grips with Duranty's misreporting. The board has responded by forming a special subcommittee to review whether the prize awarded to Duranty should be revoked. "All aspects and ramifications will be considered," said Pulitzer Prizes administrator Sig Gissler in a June statement.

While Gissler says the board never before has revoked a Pulitzer Prize, there is a precedent for one being returned. In 1981, Janet Cooke of the Washington Post was awarded a Pulitzer for her vivid story of an 8-year-old, inner-city, crack addict called "Jimmy." But it later turned out that Jimmy existed only in Cooke's imagination. The Post came clean and returned the Pulitzer.

The Times, however, says it already has done enough penance for the intentional misreporting. It claims that along with the exhibit of Duranty's Pulitzer Prize in its hallway display, there is a caveat that states, "Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage." An e-mail sent to Insight by Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications at the New York Times Co., explains: "The Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history" by returning the Pulitzer. The e-mail insists: "The Times has reported often and thoroughly on the defects in Duranty's journalism, as viewed through the lens of later events."

But Duranty's reporting was not just "defective" when "viewed through the lens of later events." It was in fact fraudulent and was contradicted by many of his contemporaries in the 1930s. Yet it wasn't until the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was imploding, that the Times was in the least critical of Duranty's reports, as many scholars of the former Soviet Union note. They also question the Times' sincerity in the matter of Duranty's reporting, arguing that even today a strain of anti-anticommunism pervades the paper's editorial page and much of its news reporting. They wonder to what extent this explains why the Times has been reluctant to return the Pulitzer.

"I've written a few columns about the Times' love affair with communism, and I'm being somewhat sarcastic," says Ronald Radosh, a historian whose works concluding that the Rosenbergs and other suspects were indeed Soviet agents were bashed by the Times through the years but have been vindicated by the opening of the Soviet historical archives. "The Times constantly over the years makes unadulterated heroes of the victims of the blacklist. In their obituaries they always present communists in a positive light. The Times seems to have lost any critical faculty when writing about the issue of communism. They would never publish glowing obituaries for dead Nazis and fascists as they do for dead communists." A recent Times obituary of novelist Howard Fast, for example, insisted that he was a victim of the 1950s blacklist without also noting that at the time he was an ardent Stalinist and member of the Communist Party.