Long before the fake news reports by such fake news New York Times reporters as Jayson Blair and Herbert Matthews, there was fake news reporter Walter Duranty who wrote fake news stories for the same newspaper about Joseph Stalin's systematic 1932/33 starvation of Ukrainian peasants...the Holodomor. Although Duranty has been written about in the past, movie audiences will soon see him portrayed on the big screen in two major motion pictures.
The first of these movies is "Bitter Harvest," which focuses on the Holodomor itself, opens in movie theaters on February 24. Here is a trailer.
Although the character of Walter Duranty is listed in the IMDB credits, it is unknown at this time how much attention will be paid to him in the film. However, the good news is that another film is in the works, to be directed by the award winning Polish director Agnieszka Holland, in which the fake news reporting of Walter Duranty will be thoroughly exposed. It is about a true hero of journalism, Gareth Jones, whose name is also the title of the movie as reported on February 10 by Variety:
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WestEnd Films has acquired worldwide sales rights to politically charged project “Gareth Jones,” the next film from twice-Oscar-nominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland, whose latest movie “Spoor” is in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.
“Gareth Jones” tells the real-life story of the eponymous Welsh journalist who exposed the Holodomor, Stalin’s 1933 genocide-famine in Ukraine. Research suggests that the reporter was murdered with the help of Soviet agents the day before he turned 30. His reporting of the famine was said to have inspired George Orwell to write “Animal Farm.”
...In the story, Jones stands in opposition to New York Times reporter Walter Duranty, who prefers to stay in Moscow and write glowing reports about the successes of communism based on Stalin’s propaganda. “It is the juxtaposition between someone who is fighting for the truth and somebody building his career on a lie,” she says. “One is an opportunist, the other is a hero, but one who pays a high price for his heroism. It doesn’t come for free; only in Hollywood superhero movies is he the winner.”
In May 1933, Gareth Jones wrote the following letter to the New York Times to attack the fake news reporting of Walter Duranty:
On my return from Russia at the end of March, I stated in an interview in Berlin that everywhere I went in the Russian villages I heard the cry; “There Is no bread, we are dying,” and that there was famine In the Soviet Union, menacing the lives of millions of people.
Walter Duranty, whom I must thank for his continued kindness and helpfulness to hundreds of American and British visitors to Moscow, immediately cabled a denial of the famine. He suggested that my judgment was only based on a forty-mile tramp through villages. He stated that he had inquired in Soviet commissariats and in the foreign embassies and had come to the conclusion that there was no famine, but that there was a “serious food shortage throughout the country. … No actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.”
While partially agreeing with my statement, he implied that my report was a “scare story” and compared it with certain fantastic prophecies of Soviet downfall. He also made the strange suggestion that I was forecasting the doom of the Soviet régime, a forecast I have never ventured.
I stand by my statement that Soviet Russia is suffering from a severe famine. It would be foolish to draw this conclusion from my tramp through a small part of vast Russia, although I must remind Mr. Duranty that it was my third visit to Russia, that I devoted four years of university life to the study of the Russian language and history and that on this occasion alone I visited in all twenty villages, not only in the Ukraine, but also in the black earth district, and in the Moscow region, and that I slept in peasants’ cottages, and did not immediately leave for the next village.
My first evidence was gathered from foreign observers. Since Mr. Duranty introduces consuls into the discussion, a thing I am loath to do, for they are official representatives of their countries and should not be quoted, may I say that I discussed the Russian situation with between twenty and thirty consuls and diplomatic representatives of various nations and that their evidence supported my point of view. But they are not allowed to express their views in the press, and therefore remain silent.
...Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true, but one does not need a particularly nimble brain to grasp that even in the Russian famine districts the dead are buried and that there the dead animals are devoured.
May I in conclusion congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the U.S.S. R.? Moscow is not Russia, and the sight of well fed people there tends to hide the real Russia.
Please read the entire letter Gareth Jones sent to the New York Times. It is a detailed damning indictment of their fake news reporter Walter Duranty.
