FACES AND PLACES: Making omelets at The New York Times (03/09/03)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Making omelets at The New York Times

A recent Gallup Poll indicates that Americans believe the media is biased; 45 percent say the media is too liberal; 15 percent believe it is too conservative.

It is no secret that many American reporters and correspondents during the past 40 or so years were and remain politically left of center. This became obvious during the Cold War, when commentators were consistently willing to give the Soviet Union the benefit of the doubt.

All of this once had an effect on the Ukrainian American community. Ukrainians were constantly writing letters to various periodicals complaining of the one-sided portrayal of the Soviet Union. Rarely did such efforts change minds.

The Great Famine in Ukraine is a classic example of the leftist bias with which we had to deal. Although there were correspondents - Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, for example - who wrote the truth, they were voices in the wilderness. Angered by the criticism, the media moguls retaliated. Muggeridge was vilified for his efforts and couldn't find work for a time.

Of all the foreign corespondents who betrayed their craft with blatant distortions and fabrications, none is more loathsome than the opium-indulging Walter Duranty, The New York Times foreign correspondent in Moscow during Stalin's genocidal destruction of Ukraine's peasantry in 1932-1933. Duranty is the father of the "give them a break" journalistic approach to communism.

It was Duranty who knowingly denied the famine in dispatches to The New York Times with descriptive euphemisms such as "serious food shortage," "mismanagement of collective farming," a conspiracy of "wreckers" and "spoilers" who had "made a mass of Soviet food production" (i.e. poor Ukrainian peasants who resisted collectivization) and the like. "There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation," he wrote, "but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." There was suffering, Duranty admitted but "to put it brutally - you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs..."

Was The New York Times correspondent aware of his lies? Absolutely. During a trip to the British Embassy soon after returning from Ukraine in 1933, Duranty explained that "the Ukraine had been bled white. The population was exhausted ... it is "quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year." Later, at a dinner party for Ann O'Hare McCormick, roving correspondent for The New York Times, Duranty repeated his estimate of millions dead.

"But Walter, you don't mean that literally?" asked Mrs. McCormick.

"Hell I don't" he replied. "I'm being conservative."

Despite certain reservations by the editorial staff of The New York Times regarding the accuracy of Mr. Duranty's dispatches, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting that was "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity..."

Not shy about taking advantage of his popularity among the Soviet elite, Duranty was able to book passage on a Soviet ship bringing Maxim Litvinov to Washington to work out the final details of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's recognition of the Soviet Union. Later, at a dinner honoring Litvinov at the Waldorf Astoria, Duranty was introduced as "one of the greatest foreign correspondents of modern times serving a great newspaper of this city." He received a standing ovation.

According to Duranty biographer S.J. Taylor: "The Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933 remains the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade ... It was Walter Duranty's destiny to become, in effect, the symbol for the West's failure to recognize and understand it at the time."

Duranty was not the only Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent to adopt the "omelet theory" of explaining Communist viciousness. In 1975, a week before the Cambodian government of Lon Nol fell, correspondent Sydney Schanberg wrote: "for the ordinary people of Indochina ... it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with Americans gone."

Deciding to remain behind as the murderous Khmer Rouge evacuated everyone from the capital city of Phomn Penh - including children, the elderly, bedridden hospital patients and the physically handicapped - and mounted a campaign of wholesale slaughter of millions of Cambodians, Mr. Schanberg was torn between viewing the genocide "through Western eyes or what might be Cambodian revolutionary eyes ... Was this just cold brutality: a cruel and sadistic imposition of the law of the jungle which only the fittest will survive?" he asked. "Or is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldier and revolutionizes, the forced evacuation of the cites is a harsh necessity? Perhaps they are convinced that there is no way to build a new society for the benefit of the ordinary man, hitherto exploited, without literally starting from the beginning; in such an unbending view people who represent the old ways and those considered weak or unfit would be expendable and would be weeded out."

In "The Killing Fields," a Hollywood movie in which Mr. Schanberg is portrayed as a hero struggling with a moral dilemma, the culprit is Richard Nixon, whose bombing of Cambodian sanctuaries of the Viet Cong, one is led to believe, precipitated the horrors visited on the people by an angry Khmer Rouge. Never mind that the Khmer Rouge did not actually take power until 20 months after the last U.S. bomb fell on Cambodia.

Between the Communist horrors of 1933 and 1975, The New York Times apparently learned nothing. In both cases, the newspaper of record decided to print stories that blamed the victims - "spoilers and wreckers" in Ukraine, the "weak and unfit" in Cambodia - rather than the perpetrators of the worst crimes (7 million Ukrainians, 2 million Cambodians died) in the history of the world.

Despite its abominable record on five continents, Marxism is still alive, still being taken seriously by politicians, columnists and academics throughout the world, and still creating confusion at American universities and in the media. Leftists just can't bring themselves to admit that for over 70 years their view of the world was and remains wrong, wrong, wrong.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected].

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