Walter Duranty - Calls For Revocation of Pulitzer Prize

Calls For Revocation of Pulitzer Prize

Criticism of Duranty's reporting on the famine led to a move to posthumously and symbolically strip him of his Pulitzer award he garnered in 1932, the year of the famine. (The 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." Duranty, Meyer said, had bet his career on Stalin's rise and "strove to preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin's crimes." Four years earlier, in a review of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, former Moscow bureau reporter Craig Whitney wrote that Duranty all but ignored the famine until it was almost over.

In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired Mark von Hagen, professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty's work. Von Hagen found Duranty's reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinist propaganda. In comments to the press he stated, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away." The Times sent von Hagen's report to the Pulitzer Board and left it to the Board to take whatever action they considered appropriate. In a letter accompanying the report, Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. called Duranty's work "slovenly" and said it "should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by his Pulitzer judges seven decades ago."

Ultimately, the administrator of the board, Sig Gissler, refused to rescind the award because "there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case."

Some claim that recently discovered documents from the estate of Duranty have paved way for a further appeal to remove the Pulitzer status based upon alleged forgeries and plagiarized manuscripts.