When it’s not entered into the historical record in that way, by the most powerful newspaper in the world claiming it didn’t happen, you miss something forever. “The New York Times absolutely covered up a genocide. However, Rindsberg believes that this is an attempt to cover up the paper’s wider involvement in the failure to report the story. The line held by the New York Times is that Duranty was a rogue reporter who was guilty of “slovenly” reporting. He then asserted that returning the Pulitzer would amount to a “Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories,” a statement which Rindsberg describes as “appalling.”

The paper’s then-publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., first claimed that the paper did not physically have the prize, a gold coin, and therefore could not return it. However, ultimately the Pulitzer committee chose not to revoke the award, and the New York Times chose not to return it. He concluded that “for the sake of The New York Times’ honor, they (the Pulitzer board) should take the prize away.” In 2003, the New York Times hired Mark von Hagen, a Soviet History professor at Columbia University, to recommend whether the paper should return Duranty’s Pulitzer. Ukrainian organizations in the United States and Canada have consistently lobbied for the revocation of Duranty’s Pulitzer.

Duranty’s 1931 work, measured by today’s standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short.” While the pieces under consideration did not cover the famine, the Pulitzer Prize Board in a 2003 review of Duranty’s award said the following: “Mr.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for 13 articles he wrote in 1931. Duranty is infamous for having consistently denied the existence of the famine in Ukraine in 19. It invokes episodes ranging from the Gray Lady’s soft coverage of the Nazi regime in Germany to their fabricated interviews with families of soldiers who died in the Iraq War.Ĭhapter two, serving as one of the book’s main attacks on the high credibility often ascribed to the New York Times, covers the paper’s aiding and abetting of Walter Duranty, their Moscow correspondent from 1922 to 1936. The book is a study of the biggest reporting failures of what many consider to be the United States’ paper of record. Walter Duranty’s shameful misreporting of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine is just one of many large-scale failures in journalism committed by the New York Times, according to The Gray Lady Winked, a new book by Israel-based American author Ashley Rindsberg.

The grey lady winked review