{"id":51,"date":"2020-11-05T09:25:59","date_gmt":"2020-11-05T14:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/?page_id=51"},"modified":"2020-12-22T02:58:30","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T07:58:30","slug":"your-choosing-i","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/your-choosing-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Choosing I (The Failures of the Fourth Estate)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In order to understand how Stalin and the Soviet Union committed such a large-scale atrocity without attracting international attention, you must be familiar with the name Walter Duranty. A journalist for the New York Times, Duranty was considered the preeminent American journalist in the Soviet Union of this era, winning the 1932 Pulitzer prize for his reporting on the Soviet Union\u2019s process of industrialization and collectivization. Now, he is most famous for his vehement denial of any famine taking place in the Ukraine, writing in the New York Times, the same year he won the Pulitzer, that “there is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition,\u201d and “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This statement of certainty gave widespread, international credibility to Stalin’s claim that reports of a genocidal famine in Ukraine were exaggerated, and is widely considered instrumental in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s decision to diplomatically recognize the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The problem with this? It was all a lie, and Duranty knew it. In a private conversation with fellow journalist Eugene Lyons he admitted that, by his estimate, the population in the Ukraine had decreased by at least six or seven million, even as he was denying any evidence of famine in the press. However, Duranty did not simply deny the genocide, he also attacked anyone who dared write about the Holodomor famine, dubbing them reactionaries.<\/p>\n

Why did Duranty do this? It is unclear, although some of his writing strongly suggests he believed in the Soviet cause, writing, even while denying the famine, this shocking sentiment: \u201cConditions are bad, but there is no famine… But\u2014to put it brutally\u2014you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>However, the point is not why Duranty did this, but the danger his story represents.<\/p>\n

How can one man, not elected or victorious in battle, change the course of history, and be an instrumental factor in the deaths of millions? Although I am not sure the story would play out the same way today, in the age of the internet, the story of Walter Duranty can serve as a prescient reminder of the sheer power of the press, and the great responsibilities that come with it. And it shows that history is written by those who have power. Even as a whole nation witnessed these atrocities, millions and millions of people, all it took was the denial of one, internationally-respected American man, to cast doubt on their experience. If it wasn\u2019t for the brave journalists who doubted Duranty\u2019s account and did their own research, the world may have never known about the Holodomor genocide.<\/p>\n

The New York Times did not retract the story until 1990, calling it \u2018some of the worst reporting ever to appear in the New York Times.\u2019 However, they refused to return the Pulitzer Prize, arguing that Duranty had received it for his other work that, as far as they knew, had not been proven false.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In order to understand how Stalin and the Soviet Union committed such a large-scale atrocity without attracting international attention, you must be familiar with the name Walter Duranty. A journalist for the New York Times, Duranty was considered the preeminent American journalist in the Soviet Union of this era, winning the 1932 Pulitzer prize for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-51","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/history-2203-fall-2020-dlasarte\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}