Perspective (or lack thereof)

Howard Kurtz takes a look a Gerald Boyd's posthumous memoir:

Faced with what would become the greatest fraud in the history of the New York Times, Gerald Boyd did not want his own reporters to investigate.

"A handoff is a dereliction of duty," he told his boss, Howell Raines, as they grappled with the fallout from Jayson Blair's fabrications. Boyd could not have been more wrong.

In Kurtz's mind, Jayson Blair is the worst fabricator in the hisotry of the Times.

Remind me again, which genocide did Blair cover-up?

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.