Not really telling us anything we didn't already know about state-run media, but interesting nonetheless.

“You have done a good job in your reporting of the USSR.” -- Joseph Stalin to Walter Duranty, reporter for the New York Times.

The descendants of Walter Duranty let their hair down on JournoList. Jonathan Strong has a story at The Daily Caller on the JournoList Email Scandal entitled "Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright."



Here's a taste of the internal thought processes of the Walter Duranty Press Collective.

Part of me doesn’t like this shit (defending the Reverend Jeremiah Wright) either. But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals . . .

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction. -- Spencer Ackerman, Washington Independent, in emails on JournoList, a private discussion group for "journalists."

"Walter Duranty is the greatest liar I have met in journalism.” -- Malcolm Muggeridge.

Walter Duranty was Joe Stalin's favorite New York Times reporter. Duranty tried his damnedest to ignore the Great Famine that Stalin had forced upon his people in order to get rid of "undesirables." Worse, he attacked other journalists who were honestly reporting on the tragedy.

We always knew that the state-run media in this country slanted, lied and did everything they could to achieve the result their political masters wished. Reading it in their own words -- so boldly and so brazenly collectivist -- is illuminating. It makes you think that Bill Clinton was onto something when he declared the press and intelligentsia of his Serbian enemies were legitimate targets of war.

Well, as Billy Beck said, "All politics in this country is now dress rehearsal for civil war." Obviously, according to JournoList, all journalism is now dress rehearsal for civil war as well. I wonder when the present-day Durantys are going to figure out that we've figured out that Acton was right when he said "The theorist is worst."

German newspaperman Julius Streicher after his date with the Nuremberg hangman.