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Times Watch for
November 24, 2003
Pulitzer Punts on Duranty's Prize, Satisfying Sulzberger
The Pulitzer Prize board last week decided not to revoke Stalinist Times reporter Walter Duranty's 1932 prize, despite protests by Ukrainian-Americans tied to the 70th anniversary of the Urkainian famine engineered by Josef Stalin--and ignored by Duranty's reporting in the Times.
Relieved Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said of the board's decision: "We respect and commend the Pulitzer board for its decision on this complex and sensitive issue. All of us at The Times are fully aware of the many defects in Walter Duranty's journalism, as we have and will continue to acknowledge. We regret his lapses, and we join the Pulitzer board in extending sympathy to those who suffered as a result of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine."
David Kirkpatrick covers the story deep in the Saturday edition of the Times (the front page reserved for the earth-moving news that a high school band will not perform Michael Jackson's "Thriller" in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.)
Roger Kimball of The New Criterion objects to Kirkpatrick's description of Duranty as "credulous" toward Soviet propaganda, writing: "Walter Duranty was not credulous, he was mendacious. There is a difference, and it beggars credulity--or does it?--to suppose that a reporter for The New York Times is unaware of the difference."
Andrew Stuttaford also weighs in on the Times refusal to purge Duranty at National Review Online: "Well, when it comes to accepting responsibility for Duranty, the New York Times (usually so eager to be seen as being on the side of the angels) has always tended to be a little reticent, so perhaps it is no surprise that its publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., seemed a touch unwilling to go quite as far as [Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen, who reviewed Duranty's work at the Times request]."
Stuttaford concludes: "The 1932 Pulitzer, the prize about which the New York Times was so proud for so long, was won by a liar and a fraud, won by a journalist to whom genocide was not news that was fit to print, won by a journalist who by his silence made his newspaper an accomplice to mass murder."
And the Times is keeping it.
• Walter Duranty | David Kirkpatrick | Pulitzer Prize | Josef Stalin | Arthur Sulzberger
After covering the Walter Duranty controversy Saturday, reporter David Kirkpatrick files another story on another media controversy within the Times. In the Sunday Week in Review, Kirkpatrick weighs in on the infamous cover art for the British edition of "The Great Unraveling," Paul Krugman's collection of anti-Bush columns: "Unlike the relatively staid cover of the American edition published by W. W. Norton, the British book jacket bears caricatures of President Bush as Frankenstein-like and Vice President Dick Cheney with a Hitler mustache. A dark scrawl on the vice president's forehead reads, 'Got Oil?'"
For an image of the book's shockingly strident cover art, click here.
For the rest of Kirkpatrick's story on the Krugman cover, click here.
• Books | Columnists | David Kirkpatrick | Paul Krugman
Book Review Editor Charles McGrath's column for the Times Sunday Magazine, "Another Holy Mystery," ponders the popularity of such religious conspiracy books as "The Da Vinci Code" and sees a rise in religious fundamentalism in America: "...the surprising message in the success of ''The Da Vinci Code'' is that at the very same time when religious fundamentalism is on the rise in this country, there are apparently millions of us who--either genuinely or for the sake of entertainment--are willing to bring to organized religion the same skepticism and distrust we bring to government."
From Times Watch's perspective, the Times has always been rather less than skeptical of the efficacy of government action--while viewing the "religious right" with distrust and sometimes outright hostility.
McGrath concludes with a weird look at Jesus the family man: "On the other hand, at least in the [Da Vinci book], there's that welcome notion of a sexy, uxorious Jesus; Jesus the family man. What would he read? People magazine probably. What would he drive? A van, of course--one big enough for all the kids." Times Watch would probably be even more taken aback if it knew what "uxorious" meant.
For the rest of McGrath's column on Jesus, click here.
• Books | Jesus Christ | Charles McGrath | Religion
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org