December 17, 2001

 

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In January, 1990, the Grammy award for best new artist was given to the pop group Milli Vanilli, fronted by the photogenic duo of Rob Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan. Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, selling 30 million singles and 14 million albums worldwide, it appeared that a phenomenon was emerging. But more than a month before the Grammy was presented, session singer Charles Shaw, who had rapped on the project, told Newsday reporter John Leland that Pilatus and Morvan were impostors, and had done absolutely no singing on the album.

Supposedly, Milli Vanilli's producer, Frank Farian, paid Shaw $150,000 to retract his statement, but then went public with the truth himself a few months later. Farian had little choice, since the no talent Rob and Fab demanded to be allowed to sing on the follow-up release. After this announcement, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences revoked the Grammy, and issued a number of pious statements regarding artistic integrity. A "truth-in-recording" bill was even introduced into Congress.

Thus, the sacred name of Grammy was preserved, and only those artists with true talent would be allowed to record, for evermore.

One would think that under a national climate of such scrutiny, and demands for truth and integrity, it would be impossible for a far more prestigious award to still remain in force, for work long known to be completely false, and quite possibly murderously destructive. However, remain in force it does, even if awards granted by the same institution have been summarily revoked for much more trivial reasons.

Which brings us to the strange case of Walter Duranty, Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, during the glory years of Joseph Stalin. Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for "his series of dispatches on Russia, especially the working out of the Five Year Plan."

Duranty, described in more polite circles as an unattractive, oversexed little man (actually he was a necrophiliac satanist serial adulterer), made a career of being Stalin's apologist. At first, it was easy enough for him to simply lie about such atrocities as the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, that claimed 14 million lives. And when some truth started leaking out, owing to the courageous reporting of Malcolm Muggeridge and others, Duranty would invoke the expression now inextricably attached to his name, "You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs."

Muggeridge's dispatches, smuggled out in a diplomatic pouch, painted an awful picture: peasants, millions of them, dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries, guarded by the army and police. "At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded like cattle into trucks at gunpoint--all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet." At a German co-operative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized wilderness, he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust of bread.

Yet, the Pulitzer committee cited Duranty's "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity," when bestowing the award in 1932, at the height of the starvation. Now transformed into a bona fide star, Duranty became the dean of Moscow reporters and would continue to spew his mendacity, helping to build Joseph Stalin, former party thug, into a world leader.

For the cost of a fancy apartment, fresh caviar every day, and providing carte blanche to the city's morgues for Duranty's sick nightly trysts, Stalin obtained an incalculable amount of positive public relations.

To be sure, Duranty could not have accomplished this massive fraud, this ongoing journalistic Potemkin village, without significant help from legions of fellow travelers, including many on the Pulitzer committee and the New York Times. It was not until 1990 that the Times even acknowledged that there might be a problem, noting in an editorial that Walter Duranty had produced "some of the worst reporting to appear in [the] newspaper," citing, in particular, his "lapse" in covering the Ukrainian famine.

But, the prize has neither been revoked nor returned.

On the other hand, in 1981, when Washington Post writer Janet Cooke admitted that her "Jimmy's World" series, about a young heroin addict, was fabricated, or at best was based on a composite of individuals, the Post quickly returned her Pulitzer, and fired her.

Thus, we are to conclude that a harmless musical hoax, and the invention of a composite character cry out to Heaven for justice, while the machinations of a vile, despicable degenerate, propping up one of the most evil men in all of human history are to be rationalized, and are better off being simply forgotten.

Just one more shameful anecdote in the sordid history of the Left.


 

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