A recent report by The New York Times shines the spotlight on how Russia influences media and journalists around the world. “How the Kremlin finds ways to spread its messages” is the title of the publication published on September 21, which used research by the USIP (United States Institute of Peace).
The report is detailed and includes media from Latin America (and Peru), but mixes simple press releases with interested ‘rebounds’ and open pro-Putin editorials. However, it is telling how the Russian narrative has branched throughout the region by inheriting the networks and political connections of the Soviet era.
The New York Times knows what it’s talking about. In 1932, the newspaper’s own correspondent in the USSR covered up the ‘Holodomor’, the famine directed by Stalin to hit the Ukrainian people. Walter Duranty prioritized the Moscow version, softened the Great Purge and crowned his correspondence with a generous interview with Stalin himself. Duranty won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the USSR, an award that the newspaper itself later tried to return and erase from its history.
Duranty’s own personality explains why he was chosen by the Kremlin. He was frivolous, a womanizer, he loved drinking and good food. Some of this can be seen in the film Mr. Jones (2019) and in the book Stalin’s Apologist. Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (1990).
Almost a hundred years later, the press is once again in Moscow’s sights, and Ukraine is once again suffering the consequences.
History always repeats itself as a tragedy.
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