1930s AD

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

When it comes to protecting the left the Times apparently has a double standard. For instance, it recently ran an editorial-page explanation backing away from a fine series of stories by Jeff Gerth and James Risen alleging that Los Alamos nuclear-lab employee Wen Ho Lee might be a Chinese spy, even though Lee pleaded guilty to some of the related charges. But it has yet to publish an explanation of Matthews' stories lionizing and promoting Castro.

Even today, this enormously powerful U.S. newspaper continues to harp on McCarthyism without holding American communists accountable for their active infiltration of U.S. institutions and support for brutal regimes, Radosh says. He recounts an incident in 1991 when, he says, he was commissioned to write a review of Guilty by Suspicion, a movie about the Hollywood blacklist of communists in the 1950s. Radosh was critical of the film, saying it did not reveal that many of those blacklisted were ardent supporters of Stalin. The Times spiked his review but ran an article by Victor Navasky of the far-left Nation magazine attacking Radosh's unpublished piece. "They didn't even run the two pieces side by side," says Radosh, whose piece eventually ran in the conservative American Spectator. (Although a letter from Radosh protesting Navasky's use of his words was published in the Times, Mathis tells Insight that "None of the editors I discussed this with had a recollection of the events you described.")

More recently the Times ran an editorial claiming that historians who were writing about the now-definitive linking of the American Communist Party to the Soviet Union were trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.). "We were not trying rehabilitate McCarthy," Radosh says. "We were trying to separate McCarthyism from anticommunism and show the validity of anticommunism, and they, of course, totally mixed the two together and attacked us without us having a say in the matter."

In her new best-selling book, Treason, conservative Ann Coulter notes that when the Venona Project was declassified and intercepted, Soviet cables were seen to prove that many long-suspected government officials such as Alger Hiss were indeed Soviet spies as charged. She found through a database search that not one article on Venona ever appeared on the front page or editorial page of the New York Times, and only 13 articles in the Times since the 1995 revelation have so much as discussed Venona.

Indeed, on the 50th anniversary of the Rosenbergs' execution this June, the Times ran an editorial saying they were not "as guilty as the government alleged," despite Venona and tons of evidence to the contrary. "They still want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were well-meaning and what they did wasn't bad," Radosh says. "In truth, Julius [Rosenberg's] KGB control [officer] said he was one of the most effective Soviet spies. I thought it was an outrage."

Radosh doesn't expect the Times' blind spot for communism to change overnight, but he says at the very least it ought to try to right historical wrong by returning Duranty's infamous Pulitzer. "Ostensibly, prizes like the Pulitzer are given for solid, serious journalism that has proven responsible," he says. "What Duranty did is so far more dangerous and scurrilous than what Janet Cooke did that it's crazy to say they shouldn't give back the Pulitzer Prize."