The same outlets that had spent years claiming that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians miraculously managed to disprove these corruption allegations overnight
Is the media silence on Hunter Biden another Walter Duranty moment? As Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture killed millions in the early-1930s USSR, Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, was filing Pulitzer-winning reports denying a tragedy that he was well aware of.
“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he wrote to his American audience.
When Gareth Jones, a well-known British journalist, reported on the mass starvation that he witnessed in a walking tour across Ukraine, Duranty dismissed Jones’s report as “a big scare story.” Pro-Soviet, and enjoying government-sponsored perks, other big-name journalists also set out to discredit Jones.
“Throwing down Jones was as unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling facts to please dictatorial regimes,” United Press International correspondent Eugene Lyons later admitted. In 1990, the New York Times called Duranty’s cover-up “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”
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