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Scholar urges revoking `Times' reporter's Pulitzer

A Columbia University history professor hired by The New York Times to assess the coverage of one of its correspondents in the Soviet Union during the 1930s said on Wednesday that the Pulitzer Prize the reporter received should be rescinded because of his "lack of balance" in covering Stalin's government.

The paper had asked the professor, Mark von Hagen, to examine the coverage of the correspondent, Walter Duranty, after receiving a letter in early July from the Pulitzer Board seeking its comment. In its letter to The Times, the board said it was responding to "a new round of demands" that the prize awarded Duranty in 1932 be revoked. The most vocal demands came from Ukrainian-Americans who contended that Duranty should be punished for failing to report on a famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.

In his report to The Times, von Hagen described the coverage for which Duranty won the Pulitzer -- his writing in 1931, a year prior to the onset of the famine -- as a "dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources."

"That lack of balance and uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime," the professor wrote, "was a disservice to the American readers of The New York Times>> and the liberal values they subscribe to and to the historical experience of the peoples of the Russian and Soviet empires and their struggle for a better life."

In his nine-page report, von Hagen, an expert on early 20th-century Russian history, did not address whether the Pulitzer Board should revoke the award it gave to Duranty. Duranty died in 1957.

But in comments first published on Wednesday in The New York Sun, von Hagen said he believed the board should indeed take such action. He echoed those remarks in an interview on Wednesday evening with The Times.

"They should take it away for the greater honor and glory of The New York Times," he said. "He really was kind of a disgrace in the history of The New York Times."
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