The New York Times Still Supports Scurrilous Journalists

By Olivia Pierson
First published on Insight@theBFD 9/10/2020

No one could argue with any semblance of honesty that Stalin was not a brutal dictator who considered murder, famine and torture good statecraft.  His communist regime was responsible for more civilian deaths during peacetime, than Hitler’s Nazis were during a time of war.

Stalin managed to cover up the Holodomor genocide-famine from the world, but only with the help of Western journalists, most notably Walter Duranty, who wrote for the New York Times while installed in a luxurious apartment in Moscow. Duranty won a Pulitzer prize in 1932 for his interviews with Stalin, and his regular dispatches to the NYT set the narrative for a long cover-up of the horrific famine in the Western media.

The famine took the lives of between 6-10 million Ukrainians who were starved by design through the collectivised farming model which heavily punished farmers for missing impossibly high grain quotas. Every edible item in the possession of peasant farmers was confiscated by Soviet troops, as the peasants slowly starved to death. Peasants were murdered or sent to prison for eating the very crops they had grown, it was deemed to be state property. Stalin particularly had it in for the kulaks, the well-to-do Ukrainian farmers who had previously cultivated the bread-basket of Europe, but were opposed to Stalin’s collectivised farming model.  Stalin wiped them out, and with them, the rest of ordinary Ukrainian peasantry.

Duranty sent back reports to the Times denying the famine by resorting to euphemisms such as “food shortages” instead of the word famine, and “widespread mortality due to diseases from malnutrition” instead of the phrase people starving to death.  The headline of one of Duranty’s dispatches read: “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.”  

As depicted in the recent film Mr. Jones, Welsh freelance journalist, Gareth Jones, traveled to Russia after working as a clerk for British Prime Minister, Lloyd George. Jones came face-to-face with victims of the famine when he alighted from his train 40 miles out from his destination in Ukraine.  Jones walked from village to village only to find the people starving in harsh winter conditions, along with what was left of their farm animals.

Jones and Duranty knew each other. In fact, Jones was “handled” by Duranty during his time in Moscow.  Those who knew Duranty personally also knew about his penchant for opium-fuelled, full-nude, pederasty parties of Romanesque proportions, and this may well have been what the NKVD (KGB precursor) had over him in the form of blackmail. Duranty, the only Western journalist allowed to interview Stalin twice, wrote interviews that were favourable to the regime and the dictator himself.

After Jones wrote about what he saw in the Ukraine, Duranty smeared him in a printed rebuttal as a liar. Jones replied in a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times to answer Duranty’s rebuttal, writing amongst other things that “the peasants said emphatically that the famine was worse than 1921 and that fellow-villagers had died, or were dying.”

Here, Jones makes reference to the hellish Russian famine of 1921, the Povolzhye famine. After WWI, U.S. President Herbert Hoover offered Lenin aid to assist victims of starvation in 1919 in exchange for allowing Americans control over the railroad system in Russia to impartially deliver food to the masses. Lenin declined. The famine hit its peak between 1921-1922 killing an estimated 5 million throughout the Volga and Ural river regions, with the peasants resorting to cannibalism.

Another well-known British journalist of the time moved to Russia in 1932 to see for himself how Stalin’s fabled Utopia was faring: Malcolm Muggeridge.
 
Very much a man of the Left, Muggeridge too wrote favourable articles about the regime as a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian.  But unlike Duranty, upon hearing the rumours of people starving to death in a mass genocide, he bucked-off his handlers and travelled to Ukraine. He was repulsed by what he found: mass executions; whole villages starving; all grain and crops confiscated; peasants resorting to cannibalism.

Muggeridge smuggled out his exposé of the famine to be published in Britain. Both Muggeridge’s and Jones’ reporting corroborated each others’ versions, which caused a contentious international debate about the Soviet experiment. Soviet officials continued to deny the famine while journalists, including Duranty, denounced Muggeridge and Jones to be libellous, sensationalist liars.

Muggeridge wrote that Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.”
​
Duranty continued to enjoy the fame and honours that his status as an award-winning foreign correspondent brought him. Jones was kidnapped and murdered in Mongolia by the Japanese in 1935 (his death occurred in shady circumstances that many believe had everything to do with the NKVD) and Muggeridge was widely discredited as a journalistic crank who couldn’t find work for many years after.

Multiple times Ukrainian-American organisations have petitioned the Pulitzer Board to revoke Duranty’s prize and have the NYT return the award. These requests have been officially denied and in a 2003 statement, the Pulitzer board declared that they have found “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” on Duranty’s part.

In her 1990 book about Duranty, titled Stalin’s Apologist, author S.J Taylor wrote that Duranty visited Ukraine himself in the autumn of 1933, then gave a confidential spoken report to the British Embassy where he admitted that, “The Ukraine had been bled white and that as many as 10 million may have died of starvation.”

So he knew, but continued to act as a shill journalist covering-up for Stalin’s evil.

In 2017 the New York Times published an article (one of many) alleging that Russian intelligence had ties to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election and transition. The Washington Post also published daily stories without let-up, during the aggressive Mueller special counsel investigation which lasted for two-and-a-half years and turned up “no evidence.” 

Now-shamed FBI officials regularly leaked false information to friendly news outlets which turned the false narrative into a witch-hunt of epic proportions. It was all fake – and some of the very same people who helped to concoct the conspiracy have admitted just how fake it all was, such as counterespionage FBI official, Peter Strzok, whose type-written notes were declassified by the FBI in July 2020. 

Strzok wrote of the said NYT's article, which asserted that, “phone records and intercepted calls” showed Trump campaign officials had contact with members of the Russian intelligence services:

“This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written… We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Russian Intelligence Officials]. . . We are unaware of any Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”

The basis for the entire Russia investigation was completely bogus – and the NYT took a special interest in keeping it highly ginned-up.  But instead of their editorial board now having the integrity to publish a retraction of false facts, this year they gleefully accepted three Pulitzer prizes for journalism and the Washington Post took away one. Their partisan and biased reporting of a now-debunked conspiracy theory devoid of any facts will disappear down the giant memory hole.

The writers of that NYT's article: Michael S. Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo are all Pulitzer awardees, Schmidt and Mazzetti both winning theirs in 2018 for their “coverage” of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

When shabby little liars posing as elite journalists win prestigious awards for their scurrilous writings, as the Times now exhibits quite a pattern of enabling, from Duranty to Schmidt and Mazzetti, then one has to ask the world what exactly a Pulitzer prize is worth, if anything?

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer”