Quotable notes

If anything, history may judge that a far bigger blot on the Times's reputation than Mr. [Jayson] Blair is Walter Duranty, who won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize as a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union. His willful shilling for Stalin went uncorrected for years. (He is also a blot on the history of the Pulitzer Board itself, which, in keeping with journalism's new haste to rectify even its old ins, is now weighing a belated revocation of Duranty's prize.) By all accounts, Duranty, like Mr. [Stephen] Glass [of The New Republic] and Mr. Blair, was an ambitious self-promoter infatuated with the limelight. But his capital journalistic crime, hiding the truth about a Ukraina famine that killed millions, offers a much darker picture of where this corruption can lead than the relative misdemeanors of his successors."

- Frank Rich, writing in the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times on Sunday, November 2, in an article titled "So Much For 'The Front Page.' " The article commented on movies and television shows about the news media, which depict the media in an unfavorable light (in contrast to films of the past such as "The Front Page" and "All the President's Men"), including a new movie titled "Shattered Glass," about the fictionalized stories filed by Stephen Glass of The New Republic.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 11, 2004, No. 2, Vol. LXXII

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