Fake news on film by Mark Judge | The New Criterion

Fake news on film by Mark Judge | The New Criterion
"The new film Mr. Jones makes a statement that critics of the media will enthusiastically support. 
The movie, which opened in Europe in 2019 and will be available to stream stateside on June 19, focuses on the work of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who in the early 1930s revealed the lies told by Stalin and the Soviet propaganda machine about the Ukraine famine—in which millions of people were starved to death in the name of “modernizing” Russia. 
Mr. Jones reminds viewers that the Western press has an appalling record of dishonesty and sympathy to totalitarian regimes, an especially relevant message in our era of “fake news.”...

...Once in Moscow, Jones realizes that Stalin’s collectivization is a fraud perpetrated by a criminal government and propped up by sympathetic journalists from the West. 
These include one Walter Duranty, the oleaginous, established correspondent for The New York Times. 
...The journalist Joseph Alsop once called Duranty a “fashionable prostitute” for the Bolsheviks, and to British writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who was blackballed by many British newspapers after reporting the truth from Russia, Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism.” 
But the Soviet sympathizer won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his exclusive interviews with Stalin. 
To defend everything from mass starvation to the show trials of 1928, 1934, and 1936, Duranty had a simple response, parroting Robespierre: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
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