Ask any journalist to name the most disreputable figure in his profession, and one name immediately comes to mind—the late New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty. Duranty is known for reporting on the Ukrainian famine precipitated by Joseph Stalin in the early Thirties. As head of the Times’s Moscow bureau, Duranty covered up the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants and perversely ran false reports written from Moscow about the success of Soviet agricultural policy. More dismaying is that his reporting from Moscow won him the very first Pulitzer Prize given to The New York Times for its foreign coverage in 1932.

The announcement of the prize proclaimed, “Mr. Duranty’s dispatches show profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia and of the causes of those conditions. They are marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity, and are excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.” Reading those words today makes one think that either the Pulitzer Prize committee of that time was willfully blind or perhaps just stupid: Everything Duranty wrote was, in reality, the very opposite of the features it singled out for praise.

Let us skip ahead to the Seventies when the world learned—at first from the scholar Robert Conquest, and then from others—about the reality of the starvation and decimation of the Ukrainian people as a result of Stalin’s Five Year Plan. That revelation didn’t stop the Times that year from listing in its pages all