This is a man [Walter Duranty] whom Malcolm Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian correspondent and Duranty’s contemporary, described as “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.”
The American Conservative, Rod Dreher: If you haven’t yet seen the film Mr. Jones, please do. It’s based on the true story of Gareth Jones, a young Welsh journalist who risked his life to expose the 1930s Ukraine famine engineered by Stalin, and that took the lives of up to 12 million Ukrainians. Stalin aside, the villain of the story is Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Pulitzer-winning Moscow correspondent, who deliberately lied about the famine to shield Stalin from Western accountability. In the Times article in which he consciously lied to discredit Gareth Jones’s reporting, Duranty acknowledged that things were not perfect in the Soviet Union, but the great things that Communists were trying to achieve there were worth it. He used the memorable phrase (repeated in the film): “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Article is here.
