Better Late Than Never?

Late

The New York Times has published a correction 48 years late.

The paper's regular corrections column reported today: "A listing of credits on April 28, 1960, with a theater review of 'West Side Story; on its return to the Winter Garden theater, misstated the surname of the actor who played Action. He is George Liker, not Johnson. (Mr. Liker, who hopes to audition for a role in a Broadway revival of the show planned for February, brought the error to The Times’s attention last month.)"

Also today, The Times came clean on having referred to Senator McCain as a Vietnam-era "fighter pilot" when in fact he was shot down while at the controls of an A-4 Skyhawk - technically an attack aircraft rather than a fighter.

Never

Still no correction for the praise of mass murderer Joseph Stalin.

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.”

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.

[In 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.

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 made, 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.”