お抱え記者の存在

ウクライナとロシアとの関係で欠かせないとされるのが1930年台の大飢饉。ホロドモールは日本のメディアでも解説してくれる番組が出てきました。

紹介されている映画『赤い闇』でも出てくるのはソ連に駐在していたWalter Durantyというニューヨークタイムズの記者。主人公は別の人で勇気を持って告発しようとしたのですが、Walter Durantyは飢饉の存在を認めない記事を書いていて、スターリンの肩を持ち続けたそうです。それにも関わらずピューリッツァー賞を当時受賞していたとか。

今回のウクライナ情勢では良心的な学者の方々がメディアに出てきて責任を果たしてくれていて、ロシアの肩を露骨に持っている人はすぐにわかるようになっているのでありがたい状況ですが、なかなか実際に何が起こっているのを知るのは難しい部分があることをこの記者の存在からも痛感します。

1980年代まで新聞社としても彼の非を認めていなかったようですが、ニューヨークタイムズはこの記者の偏向記事を認めるステートメントを出していました。

New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty

Duranty, one of the most famous correspondents of his day, won the prize for 13 articles written in 1931 analyzing the Soviet Union under Stalin. Times correspondents and others have since largely discredited his coverage.

Taking Soviet propaganda at face value this way was completely misleading, as talking with ordinary Russians might have revealed even at the time. Duranty’s prize-winning articles quoted not a single one – only Stalin, who forced farmers all over the Soviet Union into collective farms and sent those who resisted to concentration camps. Collectivization was the main cause of a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine, the Soviet breadbasket, in 1932 and 1933 – two years after Duranty won his prize.

Even then, Duranty dismissed more diligent writers’ reports that people were starving. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the “mess” of collectivization. “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Some of Duranty’s editors criticized his reporting as tendentious, but The Times kept him as a correspondent until 1941. Since the 1980’s, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures. Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize Board to cancel Duranty’s prize and The Times to return it, mainly on the ground of his later failure to report the famine.

一方のピューリッツァー賞はWalter Durantyの受賞を取り消していません。こちらがそのステートメントです。現在の視点から見ると間違っていることを認めつつ、記事にあからさまな故意は認められないので剥奪まではしないとしています。

News  November 21, 2003

Statement on Walter Duranty's 1932 Prize

After more than six months of study and deliberation, the Pulitzer Prize Board has decided it will not revoke the foreign reporting prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of The New York Times.

In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931. [A complete list of the articles, with dates and headlines, is below.]

In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short. In that regard, the Board's view is similar to that of The New York Times itself and of some scholars who have examined his 1931 reports. However, the board concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.

The famine of 1932-1933 was horrific and has not received the international attention it deserves. By its decision, the board in no way wishes to diminish the gravity of that loss. The Board extends its sympathy to Ukrainians and others in the United States and throughout the world who still mourn the suffering and deaths brought on by Josef Stalin.

ただ、動画だとイギリス大使館での会話では飢餓が起きていることを彼が認めていたという資料を見せているので、この判断に対しては異論がありそうです。なかなか現実に起こっていることを正確に判断、認識するのは難しいですが、その難しさを自覚し、間違いに気づいたら正せるようになるのが理想なんでしょう。