Walter Duranty: the CNN and MSNBC of his day. "Useful idiots" all

Walter Duranty, Stalin and the Ukrainian Famine of 1932−33  

Duranty

. . . "Duranty was among the first Westerners to predict that Stalin (highly skilled at political infighting) would emerge as the next ruler of the Kremlin, and having done so won Stalin’s favor. The second foreign reporter to be granted an interview with the “man of steel,” he found much to like. I hesitate to say Duranty was a sycophant—Stalin had plenty of those—but he certainly qualified as a “useful idiot.” Familiar with the term? Said to derive from Lenin, it means naïve Westerners who were/are susceptible to Communist propaganda and manipulation. Lincoln Steffens, the progressive journalist best known for uncovering graft in American cities, was one. He went to the USSR in 1919, came back and made the fatuous statement “I have seen the future, and it works.” John Reed was another. Edgar Snow served the same dubious purpose in Mao Zedong’s China. A generation later, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir of France, and Susan Sontag of the USA were very useful idiots.

Lemon of CNN

. . . "This amoral careerist did not write about the Ukrainian famine per se, merely alluding to it by the use of weasel words and euphemisms. Duranty was willing to admit there was hunger in the Soviet Union, but he simply would not acknowledge that things were much 
worse. In private conversation with other writers in the bar of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, however, he talked about it plenty.  Millions were starving, and they knew it. The famine was a poorly kept secret." . . .
. . . "This man, who never doubted the legitimacy of the show trials of 1936−1938, often found a way to put a smiley face on a grim country. He wrote that the deaths of all those peasants had been justified by Stalin’s noble purpose, his “march to progress.” Duranty felt that this and other Stalin-era atrocities were nothing to be very concerned about. “If you want to make omelettes,” he paraphrased Robespierre, “you have to break a few eggs.' ” . . .
Ukrainians want pro-Stalin writer stripped of Pulitzer

Image by Antonio Chaves at AmericanThinker

Andrea Widburg: "Watching the lunacy at the New York Times, my schadenfreude meter has hit 10"  

. . . "Of late, though, something's changed at the old Red Lady.  The college grads of the 1960s and 1970s are being pushed out by people who graduated after the year 2000.  These new employees (I cannot, in good conscience, call them journalists) are not merely left-wing; they are radical, anarcho-socialist leftists.  And because they are college grads, they have exquisite sensibilities that equate opposing ideas with violent physical attacks against themselves." . . .

  Sean Ono Lennon, son of John and Oko, tweeted to the Times;  

This is the end for you guys. Firing someone for allowing different opinions in your paper means you are no longer a real newspaper. It’s been fun. You had a good run. The best in fact. R.I.P. https://twitter.com/nytimespr/stat

us/1269722985751027713  …Speaking of the Duranty Award, here are MSNBC and CNN, who used the Duranty techniques to report on the riots. The Tunnel Dweller

NBC ALLEGEDLY TELLS REPORTERS NOT TO USE THE WORD 'RIOTS' IN GEORGE FLOYD COVERAGE

Liberty Unyielding.

MSNBC's Ali Velshi says situation not 'generally speaking unruly' while standing outside burning building
. . . "I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly but fires have been started and this crowd is relishing that," Velshi told Williams. "There is a deep sense of grievance and complaint here, and that is the thing. That when you discount people who are doing things to public property that they shouldn't be doing, it does have to be understood that this city has got, for the last several years, an issue with police, and it's got a real sense of the deep sense of grievance of inequality." . . .

CNN Reporter Says Riot Is ‘Entirely Peaceful,’ Immediately Gets Stuff Thrown At Him
But "not in a mean way"

. . . "On live television, CNN anchor Miguel Marquez told Don Lemon that the George Floyd protests in Minnesota were "entirely peaceful" and a "merry caravan" and then seconds later people throw bottles directly at him. " . . .
The New York Times has always been the go-to source that has set the tone for most other news sources for the past two centuries:

Past winners of the coveted Duranty award.  Recognized in Canada; international fame.
 . . . Duranty was a reporter for the New York Times in the 1930s, who sent back glowing dispatches praising Stalin’s Soviet “utopia.” His worship of the Soviet system coincided with Stalin’s murder of ten million Ukrainians and a nearly equal number of Russian citizens.

The brass Lemon

"It was not until the 1990s — when the Soviet Union fell and its Archives were opened to researchers — that the world learned the unvarnished truth about Walter Duranty’s reportage and his motives: Like his ideological allies at CNN, he was a skilled liar, whose “fake news” was contrived to serve the cause of International Socialism.
"Duranty lived a life of opulence, much like those in the Soviet Union’s ruling class or Nomenklatura. He was secretly awarded his own luxurious country home (or “dacha”) by Stalin, and was generously wined and dined, while the average Soviet citizen queued for hours to buy rationed cabbages." . . .
"Imbeciles who rely on CNN wouldn’t know this, but . . ."

CNN awarded the treasured Lump Of Coal in 2018 I suggest the prize committee replace the lump of coal with a lemon



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