Walter Duranty

Who was Walter Duranty?

Walter Duranty was a Liverpool-born, Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a series of laudatory stories on the Soviet Union. He was a highly respected journalist until his denial of widespread famine in the USSR, the Ukraine mass starvation in particular.

His reporting and motivations have been hotly debated, leading to calls to revoke his Pulitzer. Duranty's reporting is faulted for being too uncritical of the Soviet regime, including having presented Soviet propaganda as legitimate reporting.