PJ Media
First some background: The Duranty Prize is named after the "somewhat notorious Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times between 1922 and 1936, Walter Duranty.
"..... To review for those in this room — most of whom do know — for some fourteen years Walter Duranty, then the most famous and respected foreign correspondent in the world — also, as it happens, a Brit — whitewashed the repressive evil deeds of the Soviet Union....
"He did this whitewashing most prominently in the case of the Ukrainian Holodomor: the forced starvation of between 1.2 and 12 million ethnic Ukrainians, depending on whose estimates you believe. In other words, a lot of people. Duranty called that genocide “an exaggeration and malignant propaganda” in the newspaper of record. ....
Newsweek's Lorraine Ali and the Ghost of Walter Duranty
Why do we call the New York Times the New Duranty Times?
Runner-up; Andrew Sullivan;
...".If you have any doubts about what Sullivan thinks of Israel, his answer came in a column he wrote only a few days ago: “We give the Israelis everything they ask for and they give the U.S. nothing in return.
...."The second reason Andrew Sullivan deserves the prize is for his neverending and relentless crusade to prove that Sarah Palin was not the mother of her Down Syndrome baby, Trig."
....
"Finally, we must also cite Sullivan’s over-the-top cover story for Newsweek on Obama. In his eyes, the president is a conciliator of the center willing to work with Republicans, but foiled by right-wing Republicans bent only on his destruction. He does not refer to Bob Woodward’s new book, in which Woodward reveals Obama as a chief executive who eschewed cooperation across the aisle and sought instead to implement an unpopular health care program without any Republican support."
FIRST RUNNER-UP by Roger Kimball;
"The selection committee of the 2012 Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity is delighted to award its commendation and second-place prize to Bob Simon for his supremely untruthful report “Christians of the Holy Land,” which aired last April on CBS’s storied news show 60 Minutes."
DURANTY PRIZE WINNER by Claudia Rosett;
The selection committee is pleased to bestow the Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity on reporter Joan Juliet Buck and editor Anna Wintour, for their... fearless dismissal of the truth in ... “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.”
...."With Syrians engaging in rather more active citizenship than Asma, in her charity works, apparently had in mind, the Assad regime tried to suppress the uprising by killing its own fellow citizens — shooting, shelling, jailing, torturing, and murdering even children. Unlike in Duranty’s day, thanks to modern technology it did not take long for these horrors to hit the headlines. Vogue’s paean to the Assads was abruptly exposed as one of modern journalism’s most mortally embarrassing makeovers.
With instincts worthy of the old Soviet politburo, or for that matter, the Assad dictatorship, Vogue’s initial response was neither to apologize nor to correct the record, but simply to delete the article from its web site."
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