Reddit reviews Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow
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Stalin's Apologist. The New York Times aggressively pushed Russian propaganda to cover up the Holodomor.
You would NEVER get a Pulitzer for exposing the DNC for what they are. Pulitzer is not about investigating and reporting the truth.
It's a leftist circle-jerk prize given to leftits.
I mean, they still havent cancelled the Pulitzer they gave to well-known commie liar for his fake news. Instead of cancelling it they still claim to be unaware that there was something incorrect in his lies (”there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case”). Which is no wonder considering the Pulitzer committee has long and deep ties to cultural marxism going back to 1930s.
Relevant history:
Walter Duranty, the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times 1922–1936 and correspondent until 1941, won a Pulitzer prize for his series of articles about the Stalin's Soviet Union. It was fake news and propaganda published by the New York Times, a publication with a long documented history of publishing fake news.
Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow
To say that the NYT's reporting was misleading would be an understatement, they contained lies and propagandist apologism for Stalin's ruthless rule including persistent denial of famine and the mass starvation of Ukraine killing millions.
"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931
"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
New York Times, December 9, 1932
And when some other papers reported about the starvation the NYT went and published shit like this:
"In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with 'thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation."
New York Times, March 31, 1933
"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
New York Times, August 23, 1933
New York Herald Tribune reporter Ralph Barnes asked Duranty what he was going to write about the famine. He replied: "Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated."
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
New York Times, May 14, 1933
The NYT's fake news were not without consequence, they were impactul not only on public but on policy makers too. In his groundbreaking history about Stalin's forced collectivization and mass starvation in Ukraine, Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest concluded:
> As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.
Well just take a look at some of their Pulitzer Prize award winning journalists...
https://www.amazon.ca/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007
> For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared.
The story of Walter Duranty and the NYT is especially alarming because of suppression of other voices. George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, but couldn't get his criticisms of the Stalinist a fair hearing in the UK. Malcolm Muggeridge managed to get uncensored reports of famine back to the UK in the diplomatic bag, where they languished.
> Before the web, it really wasn’t easy to stumble across false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.
My mother used to believe her woman's magazines. I tried to explain that they are run on the cheap. The editor needs an article, perhaps ten ways to eliminate wrinkles, and a busy journalist makes shit up. Ta da! But she never got it. Written, printed, it was all true.
Actually it was much worse than that. The demonisation of dietary fat was based on slim, cherry picked evidence, but it was official - it was sometimes hard to discover an alternative to false or crazy information convincingly passing itself off as true.
I studied American History for O-level in 1976. What caused the Great Depression? As a school boy I had no access to alternatives to the "crisis of capitalism" narrative. Yet A Monetary History of the United States had been published 13 years earlier. The experts in government had screwed up, but in the 1970's the Zeitgeist favoured government experts, so the truth was slow to spread and weird shit such as "WWII revved up the economy and ended the Great Depression" was widely believed despite being bat-shit insane.
> But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016, wrote last year. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”
Having done some post-graduate research in statistics I'm aware of the replication crisis in psychology and medicine. The p-hacking scandal is part of it. The scientific journals are important validating institutions, but What has happened down here is the winds have changed When Susan T. Fiske doubled down on questionable research practices by condemning their critics as "methodological terrorists" she burned the credibility of the Association for Psychological Science to the ground. Republicans didn't do this. Academics did it to themselves.
"How America Went Haywire" is an interesting article because it fills in historical background going back to the 1960's. But much is missing. one example The Murray-GellMann amnesia effect. Another is the seminal work of Philip E. Tetlock.
Notice how the effects amplify each other. The mainstream media credulously report the mainstream experts. When the experts turns out to be wrong, ordinary folk know because, well, it gets a little subtle. The media report the news. Five years down the line the media are reporting more news, but they don't hold experts to account. The media don't say that old predictions are wrong, they print new predictions. Indeed they seduce the experts into making bold predictions; you need to be bold, to get published, and you can afford to be bold because you will not be held to account for you predictions.
Eventually ordinary people notice that things don't turn out the way they are supposed to and the credibility of both experts and media is lost. I'm not seeing Republican fingerprints on this.
"You just believe the rightie lies."
You get a Walter Duranty Award !
"The concern over Duranty's reporting on the famine in Soviet Ukraine led to a move to posthumously and symbolically strip him of his Pulitzer award he garnered in 1932, the year the famine started, although Pulitzer in question did not involve the famine. In response to Taylor's book, the Times assigned a member of its editorial board, Karl Meyer, to write a signed editorial regarding Duranty's work. In a scathing piece, Meyer said that Duranty's articles were "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper." (from wiki)
http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007
Stories like this and CNN blatantly calling someone a peaceful protester, who called for violence against innocent suburban citizens, is exactly why Trump has ammunition when he calls out fake news agencies on the left. Going all the way back to Walter Duranty, and how his work with the NY Times (which he won a Pulitzer Prize for) in the 1930s helped cover up the Soviet communist caused famine in the Ukraine, far too many news agencies on the left completely disregard journalistic ethics to push an agenda. They do the same stupid shit right wing outlets like Breitbart, Fox, and Hannity do but somehow, its wrong for many left minded people to call out CNN, The NY Times, etc due to some stupid idea of "whataboutism" when, in all honesty, lies and distortions should have no place in news what so ever on any side.
Article on CNN ignoring a protesters calls for violence against innocent suburban residents https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/cnn-sorry-for-not-airing-full-clip-of-milwaukee-sister&ved=2ahUKEwj4nZzh1t_kAhWFg-AKHebMBVsQFjACegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw2PceVYxQadmUFb0u6bI0Ep&cshid=1568992052867
Book on Walter Duranty printed by the scholarly Oxford University Press that details his pro Stalinist work and violation of journalistic ethics regarding his coverage of the Soviet Union while employed by the NY Times https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007&ved=2ahUKEwj20dSe19_kAhXlRt8KHf6UC_gQFjAYegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw036zS9vCcfuDMzksnIkx_H&cshid=1568992175546