All the News That’s “Fit” to Print

Recent statements by a nascent, anti-capitalist guerrilla group in Greece, the “Sect of Revolutionaries” made me think of my late, Ukrainian born grandfather, which might be baffling until I link the two together, and then it will be crystal clear.  The “Sect”, it appears, has declared war on journalists,  recently murdering one of them,  Sokratis Giolias.  Why, when the role of journalists in the past has been to expose corrupt governments, provide a forum for alternative views on social, political, economic, and other issues, and act as an independent, monitoring force?  According to the “Sect”, it is because  journalists have betrayed their readers by becoming paid propagandists for the financial agendas and ideological positions of their owners and editors, and shameless promoters of rotten capitalism; in other words, as they have claimed, “manufacturing news to keep the public docile and subservient….as the Nazi propaganda minister, Goebbels, used to say, ‘keep on repeating and repeating, something will stick’."  Not only does the media tell lies, but it “fabricates truths…disconnects each event from its social context, the causes which contribute to its existence, its contents and its significance…thus the famine in an African country occurs on a parallel with the latest Versace show.”

It was the mention of famine that made me think of my grandfather.  He fled in 1900, from an abusive stepfather, to Canada and then America, at the tender age of eighteen.  When he finally arrived, without a penny in his pocket, he sat down on a curb and cried his eyes out.  He later married and raised four children, one of them my father.  In the early 1930s, while he and his family were enjoying the benefits of living in a free, prosperous, democratic society, with an allegedly free, independent media, a devastating famine was raging in the Ukraine.  Stalin had forced the kulaks into collective farms under the guise of “agrarian reform”, and those who resisted were sent to concentration camps.  The collectivization process led to the widespread famine, which, at the high point in 1933, took the lives of over 25,000 people every day.  Whole families, villages, and cities disappeared.  A total of several million eventually perished, and what could be more painful, more horrific than slowly starving to death, watching one’s family’s lives slip away as their bones begin to protrude, their teeth fall out, their eyes implode?   Death in an oven almost seems a blessing in comparison, much quicker and less agonizing.  Yet the deaths of these millions were hidden, denied, as though they were fleas, or bugs, or some other trivial organisms instead of human beings of flesh and blood, with warm, pulsating hearts, souls, dreams, aspirations.  Maybe because they belonged to the "wrong" nation, ethnic group?  As a child, I never recall the famine being mentioned by my grandfather or anyone else, but I know he never heard from his family members again.  Some said later they were exiled to Samarkand.  Others said they’d probably died or moved or emigrated. There were all sorts of stories, none of them confirmed. 

At that time, the New York Times , which carries the famous byline, “all the news that’s fit to print”, had its Moscow station chief, Walter Duranty,  reporting on Stalin's „agrarian reforms“.  Duranty, though, .insisted that, although there had been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine,  "there was no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation“, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."  In further articles he repeated the lies:  "There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be"; "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda"; "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Duranty was eventually awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his Russian reports.  As Soviet archives were opened to the public and information about the famine, and the millions of victims who starved to death, was exposed, it became increasingly impossible to deny that the New York Times Moscow station chief, Walter Duranty, had served as a Stalin apologist and propagandist, and had kept the world from learning about, and perhaps preventing, the mass starvations and genocide in the Ukraine.  He knew the truth, though, as did many others in the New York Times and elsewhere, because in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," a remarkable statement from someone who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," Many public figures called on the Pulitzer Committee to rescind the award.  Sally Taylor, author of ;Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times Man in Moscow; (Oxford University Press 1990) fully documented how Duranty covered up the truth and distorted matters to ingratiate himself to Stalin and his „murderous henchmen“. 

Malcolm Muggeridge described Duranty as the "greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met."  Famed American commentator Joseph Alsop later said of Duranty that "lying was his stock in trade."  But the Pulitzer Committee rejected two calls for rescission, stating that „the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.“  (An era that tolerated genocide, perhaps?  Circumstances that condoned the slow death of millions of innocents? )  Meanwhile, his former employer, the New York Times, the so-called „epitome“ of professional journalism, the „gold standard“ to which every media aspires, continues year after year to proudly list Duranty's name on its roster of Pulitzer Prize winners.  All the news that's fit to print?  Indeed.

My Ukrainian relatives disappeared without a trace.  And that's my grandfather's connection, however tangential, to the „Sect of Revolutionaries“ war against journalists.

But if the New York Times can lie, mislead, and fabricate, and it does, regularly, why not our local media, why not all „free, democratic, independent“ media?  Inflating or underestimating the number of victims, of whatever massacre, or crime, or battle, denying the crimes of some and manufacturing or exaggerating  those of others, ignoring the critical issues of the times, or placing them side by side with the latest “news”:  Potpuno gola Kelly Brook roni s prijateljicom!  Talijanskoj ministrici ispale grudi! Hana voli analni seks! Promoting cars, mindless game and reality shows, exotic vacations and  „elite“ activities to fill one’s time and empty one’s mind, and especially one’s pockets….Well, it’s hard not to agree with the Greek “Sect of Revolutionaries”, and their judgement on corrupted journalists:  "They choose to live as rodents in the kingdom of mud, their sordid circle, and we as wolves outside of the herd".  But I obviously don't support killing the rotten apples; instead, why not hit them where it hurts:  Boycott their media! Stop buying, stop reading, and stop watching!   They'll soon be out of a job and so will their pimps.