EDITORIAL: The Times's complicity (12/04/05)

EDITORIAL

The Times's complicity

Last week's front page carried a story headlined "Protesters' demand: The New York Times must repudiate Walter Duranty's reporting." It reported that a small but determined group of demonstrators picketed The Times headquarters in New York City in hopes of influencing - or shaming - the newspaper into acknowledging that its star foreign correspondent did not deserve to receive the Pulitzer Prize for 1932.

They called on the publisher of The New York Times to acknowledge that the Pulitzer was given to Duranty in error since his dispatches from the USSR had parroted the official Soviet line instead of offering objective information, and to renounce Duranty's journalistic work because he denied that millions were dying as a result of Famine in Ukraine - even while privately admitting exactly that.

Requesting such action by The Times in regard to one of its own correspondents is certainly not unprecedented.

Back in 2003, The Times published a huge article that began on page 1, detailing the fraud perpetrated upon its readers by reporter Jayson Blair, who was responsible for, in the words of The Times, a "chain of falsifications and plagiarism" that appeared in the paper. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. referred to the case as "a huge black eye" and "an abrogation of the trust between a newspaper and its readers." Mr. Sulzberger, and the executive and managing editors at the time, also reassured the newspaper's staffers: "We are resolved to do all that we can to learn from this tragedy and prevent any similar instances of journalistic fraud in the future."

This year, The New York Times and controversial reporter Judith Miller "agreed to part company" after she was criticized, on the pages of The Times and elsewhere, for inaccurate reporting on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - basically parroting the Bush administration position on WMD - and her professional conduct in the wake of the Valerie Plame affair (in which the identity of a CIA operative was revealed by the press). By parting company with her, The Times disavowed Ms. Miller.

And yet, The Times won't budge on Duranty.

The paper's response to the recent demonstration in front of its headquarters, a reaction solicited by this newspaper, was a repeat of its statement from 2004. "The Times has not seen merit in trying to undo history," it stated, while referring to the decision of the Pulitzer Prize board to not revoke Duranty's award.

From where we sit, unless The Times has joined the ranks of Famine deniers, the least The Times could do is publicly acknowledge that Duranty's reporting from the USSR was deeply flawed and that his dispatches concealed a genocide in progress in Ukraine. Of course, if The Times were truly concerned with journalistic principles - and the truth - it could renounce the Pulitzer Prize Duranty was awarded, instead of using the Pulitzer board's inaction as an excuse. (The Times has said it cannot physically return the prize since it is not in its possession.)

As long as The New York Times refuses to "part company" with Duranty, to reveal the facts surrounding Duranty's successful duping of the public, to repudiate his heinous reporting, Duranty's offense will remain a stain on its history and its collective conscience. And The Times will remain complicit in one of history's greatest and most tragic cover-ups - a cover-up that cost 10 million lives.

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