From the UK's Guardian Unlimited:
The New York Times has been told that the Pulitzer prize awarded to one of its correspondents in the Soviet Union 70 years ago should be rescinded because the journalist was not critical enough of Stalinism, it emerged yesterday. The recommendation came from the history professor hired by the paper in response to calls from Ukrainian-Americans for the prize to be revoked. Prof Mark von Hagen said of the reporter Walter Duranty: "He really was a kind of disgrace."
Duranty, one of the paper's correspondents in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, was awarded a 1932 Pulitzer prize, the premier award in American journalism, for his coverage of the area. He died in 1957. Discussion of his supposedly uncritical reporting surfaced as the cold war drew to a close in the 80s and early 90s and he was the subject of a critical biography, Stalin's Apologist, by SJ Taylor.
The Pulitzer board then held an inquiry to see whether his award should be revoked but decided to let it stand. Since then, Ukrainian-American groups have complained that Duranty did not properly report the famines of the period, in which millions of Ukrainians died. He once described reports of the famine as "mostly bunk". In response to the calls and a decision by the Pulitzer board to carry out another investigation, the paper asked Prof Von Hagen, of Columbia University, to make an independent assessment.
In a nine-page report, he concluded that "lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime was a disservice to the American readers of the New York Times and the liberal values they subscribe to and to the historical experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires and their struggle for a better life". Prof Von Hagen said the prize should be revoked "for the greater honour and glory of the New York Times". Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the paper's publisher, said this week that the paper had frequently acknowledged that Duranty's reporting was deeply flawed. But he said rescinding the prize might be seen as similar to the "Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories" and would set a dangerous precedent for revisiting prize-winning stories written in different eras. The Pulitzer board has yet to make its decision. It has the power to rescind prizes when a journalist is shown to have deliberately falsified a story. Mr Sulzberger said the paper would respect
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1069818,00.html
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