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Times Watch for 03/10/03
Bob Herbert's Unlikely "Innocent"
Times columnist and former NBC reporter Bob Herbert took up the cause of yet another "innocent" on death row. "Delma Banks Jr., a 43-year-old man who is scheduled in about 48 hours to become the 300th person executed in Texas since the resumption of capital punishment in 1982," Herbert wrote in Monday's edition.
Before alleging prosecutor misconduct and racist application of the death penalty, "District Attorney" Herbert argued that "Mr. Banks, a man with no prior criminal record, is most likely innocent of the charge that put him on death row."
Never mind that, as a mostly sympathetic account in the Washington Post admitted, prosecutors said "some of the most damning evidence against Banks has remained unchallenged, including the fact that he unwittingly led police to the .25-caliber pistol used to kill 16-year-old Wayne Whitehead."
"Because Banks had been seen with Whitehead," wrote Post reporter Lee Hockstader, "police immediately focused their investigation on him. They sent a paid informant, Robert Farr, to ask Banks where he could purchase a gun. With sheriff's deputies tailing them, Banks then led Farr 180 miles to Dallas, where he had spent the weekend after Whitehead's murder at the home of a small-time ex-convict named Charles Cook. The sheriff's deputies then burst in on Cook, who led them to the murder weapon."
Walter Duranty, the Times' Useful Idiot
A new book, "Stalin's Last Crime," asserts the Russian dictator may have been poisoned to death. Serge Schmemann wrote on the Times editorial page: "There's something satisfying in learning from a new book that Stalin may have been the last victim of his own apocalyptic killing spree."
He went on to admonish: "Before getting too worked up about Russian attitudes toward Stalin, it is worth remembering that "Uncle Joe" was not always the same demon in our eyes that he is today. The New York Times of March 6, 1953, in which Stalin's death got a banner headline, made no mention of the purges or the gulag."
But Schmemann let the "newspaper of record" off far too easy. Many people (including left-wing journalist Malcolm Muggeridge) knew what kind of man Stalin was, and said so at the time. And, while Schemann's implicit criticism of the Times is welcome, the paper's refusal to report the reality of Stalinism wasn't limited to a specious obituary upon Stalin's death.
As columnist Mona Charen reminds us in her quote-packed new book "Useful Idiots," Walter Duranty, the Times man in Moscow in the 1930s, ignored state-sanctioned famine that claimed over 10 million victims while leading the cheers for phony Russian successes.
Duranty wrote for the Times: 'Stalin is giving the Russian people-the Russian masses, not Westernized landlords, industrialists, bankers, and intellectuals, but Russia's 150,000,000 peasants and workers-what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort.'" Duranty is credited with originating the line, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," in the context of excusing Stalin's crimes.
In 1932, Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for his "dispassionate, interpretive reporting on Russia" for the Times.