Revoking Duranty's Pulitzer.(Insider Report)

In 1932, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, a shill for the Soviet Union, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the Ukrainian terror famine. Duranty's role in covering up that atrocity--the systematic starvation by the Soviets of as many as 10 million people--was to retail the lies fed to him by Josef Stalin's regime. The Soviet lies regurgitated by Duranty, and retailed by the Times to the public, helped grease the skids for U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933--which in turn opened the spigots for aid and trade to the Communist behemoth.

In our September 8 issue, THE NEW AMERICAN reported that 70 years after the Pulitzer Committee became a party to this crime against humanity, "the push is on to have Duranty's Pulitzer Prize revoked due to the slanted and partisan nature of his reporting and his role in covering up the man-made famine." Earlier this year, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America announced a campaign to have Duranty's Pulitzer revoked, noting that the Timesman not only covered up the truth but also "called other journalists outright liars for reporting about Ukraine's Famine Genocide." Since then, the Pulitzer Board has been buried beneath postcards and deluged with e-mails from around the globe urging that it withdraw the prize.

In July, the Pulitzer Prize Board asked the Times to examine Duranty's coverage of the Ukrainian terror famine. The paper, reeling from more recent scandals that undermined whatever credibility it once had, hired Columbia University history professor Mark von Hagen to make an independent assessment of Duranty's work. Von Hagen concluded that "the Pulitzer Prize [Duranty] received should be rescinded because of his 'lack of balance' in covering Stalin's government," reported the October 23 New York Times.