UCCLA-initiated postcard project seeks to rescind Duranty's Pulitzer (05/04/03)

UCCLA-initiated postcard project seeks to rescind Duranty's Pulitzer

TORONTO - On May 1 thousands of postcards were to be mailed from around the world to the New York-based Pulitzer Prize Committee. They call for the posthumous revocation of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence awarded to Walter Duranty of The New York Times for his reporting on the Soviet Union.

As Sally Taylor, author of "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times' Man in Moscow" (Oxford University Press, 1990) has confirmed, Duranty repeatedly distorted the truth about conditions in the USSR, even to the extent of covering up news about the politically engineered Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA) underscored that, simultaneously, Duranty actively denigrated others who tried to report on this Communist crime against humanity. Many millions of Ukrainian men, women and children starved to death, even as Soviet spokesmen denied that a famine was taking place and refused offers of aid from abroad. Thus, Duranty willingly helped cover up genocide.

Remarking on this campaign, UCCLA's director of research, Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, said:

"Duranty was described by one of his contemporaries, Malcolm Muggeridge, as the 'greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met.' Undeniably, Duranty betrayed the most fundamental principle of journalism, for he did not truthfully report on what he witnessed. Over many years, in fact, he did just the opposite, and viciously smeared as propagandists those honest journalists who dared tell the truth. Duranty was particularly odious when he denied that the Stalinist regime had created a famine on Ukrainian lands, deliberating causing the death of millions."

Dr. Luciuk explained that "Today we are calling upon those who want to preserve the integrity of journalism, and the stature of the Pulitzer Prize itself, to revoke Duranty's distinction. Those who say that his prize was earned for what he wrote before 1932 are being disingenuous. Duranty was a shill for the Soviets before, during and after the Great Famine. Perhaps those who honored him with a Pulitzer in 1932 did not fully know just how dishonest he was.

"Now we, and the jurors of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, and the editors, writers and owners of The New York Times, know better. Someone who helped cover up so atrocious a crime against humanity should not continue to be honored as one of the greats of journalism."

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For more on the campaign to have Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize revoked log on to www.uccla.ca.

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