True story of media bias

[joeb]

I see a great deal of skepticism around here that media bias exists, or has existed.  I will tell a story here of extreme bias in favor of socialism that stretches from the 1930's until 2003.

The story being reported on was about Stalin and how he was starving the Ukrainians to death.   I'll call the New York Times reporter involved in the story, A, and the other person involved in the story, B.  A, in his dispatches to the NYT wrote that there was absolutely no truth to the reports there were millions of people in danger of starving to death.  Journalist B reported from the Ukraine that millions of people were either dying or in great danger of dying because Stalin had sealed the borders and destroyed the food and seed stock so no one could plant and grow food to keep themselves alive. 

Reporter A privately acknowledged, during the same time frame during which he was filing false reports, that millions would die, the exact opposite of what the New Times published.

Reporter A won the Pulitzer prize for his reports because they were "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity".  Journalist B's reports were dismissed as hysterical tirades by Beatrice Webb, coauthor of a book with her husband Sidney on an internationally known study of the Soviet Union. Journalist B was vilified in the news media and as a result could not find any work.  He was frozen out of the journalistic business altogether.  It bankrupted him, and friends had to take he, his wife, and two children in and feed and clothe them because of the boycott against him. 

You don't  believe this?  You can find the story in Thomas Sowell's book Intellectuals and Society starting on page 122 under the heading Suppressing Facts.  The story is footnoted, as is the entire book, so you can find the original documentation for the story. 

P.S.  The Times finally admitted that the stories  were some of the worst NYT reporting ever but it took them decades to do so.  Even then they did not call them lies, which they most assuredly are. They made the admission they did only after a book was written on A and his behavior 60 years later.  It took the Times until 2003 to take any action towards removing A's Pulitzer, and then only after an international furor was led by the Ukranian Canadian Civil Liberties Association did they submit a report to the Puliitzer Prize committee that was neutral and left the question revoking the Pulitzer completely up to the Pulitzer Prize committee.  The chairman of the Pulitzer Prize committee said, after declining to withdraw the prize, "there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case."  The fact that a lot of A's "reporting" were Soviet Union press releases of the day didn't seem to matter at all to him or the comittee.  

In other words, both the Times left the lies stand for 60 years.  The Times only retracted the story after being completely exposed even though they had known for 60 years the story was absolutely false.  What an example of journalistic integrity.  The Pulitzer Prize committee lets the lies stand unpunished even today. 

There is a Wikipedia article about B but it fails to mention not only to mention how badly he was vilified for telling the truth and the impact it had on he and his family, but fails to mention it at all.