Think about it: sports fans argue for players to be recognized with Most Valuable Player awards, Rookie of the Year, Most Improved Player, all-conference, all-league, etc. People get very exercised about the additional recognition received by millionaires they’ll never know personally. Some even rue the fact that certain stars’ primes are being “wasted” by their teams who don’t put them in a position to win a championship SO THAT the player can be recognized as one of the best ever. Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets of the NBA is a prime example.

Same with TV shows and the actors in them, same with movies and the actors in them. Same with all genres of music. We tout a show, movie, actor, or singer as the best or more deserving than another of the specific award bestowed and fight furiously for a millionaire actor who is world-famous to get EVEN MORE recognition. Probably to validate ourselves as having picked the right horse, figuratively speaking.

But greatness is still great, even if it’s not recognized by the official recognizers of greatness. If Nikola Jokic doesn’t receive the NBA MVP award, he still had a historic season. Goodfellas is still one of the best movies ever made, even if it lost to Dances With Wolves, and who remembers the movie that won Best Picture over Citizen Kane in 1941?

The picture of Trump with his fist in the air and blood running down his face became iconic the moment it was taken. It seems providential that the photographer caught and framed a scene that condenses that moment perfectly. Who can see it without murmuring to themselves, “Fight. Fight. Fight!”

Awards don’t matter. Greatness is what matters. And all of us have the capability to recognize greatness. That photograph is great. I don’t need someone to tell me it is. I know.

As it happened, no other foreign journalist had been into the famine areas in the USSR except under official auspices and supervision, so my account was by way of being exclusive. This brought me no kudos, and
many accusations of being a liar, in The Guardian correspondence columns and elsewhere. I had to wait for Khruschev – who surely knew the truth if anyone did, having been himself one of the chief terrorists in the Ukraine – for official confirmation. Indeed, according to him, my account was considerably under-stated. If the matter is a subject of
controversy hereafter, a powerful voice on the other side will be
Duranty’s, highlighted in the New York Times, insisting on those granaries overflowing with grain, those apple-cheeked dairymaids and plump contented cows, not to mention Shaw and all the other dis­tinguished visitors who testified that there was not, and could not be, a food shortage in the USSR. I doubt if even Khruschev’s testimony, let alone mine, will weigh against such honourable and distinguished witnesses.

In Kiev, where I found myself on a Sunday morning, on an impulse I
turned into a church where a service was in progress. It was packed
tight, but I managed to squeeze myself against a pillar whence I could
survey the congregation and look up at the altar. Young and old, peasants
and townsmen, parents and children, even a few in uniform – it was a
variegated assembly. The bearded priests, swinging their incense, in­toning their prayers, seemed very remote and far away. Never before
or since have I participated in such worship; the sense conveyed of
turning to God in great affliction was overpowering. Though I could
not, of course, follow the service, I knew from Klavdia Lvovna little
bits of it; for instance, where the congregation say there is no help for
them save from God. What intense feeling they put into these words! In
their minds, I knew, as in mine, was a picture of those desolate aban­doned villages, of the hunger and the hopelessness, of the cattle trucks
being loaded with humans in the dawn light. Where were they to turn
for help? Not to the Kremlin, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
certainly; nor to the forces of progress and democracy and enlightenment
in the West. Honourable and Right Honourable Members had nothing
to offer; Gauche Radicale unforthcoming, free press Duranty’s pulpit.
Every possible human agency found wanting. So, only God remained,
and to God they turned with a passion, a dedication, a humility, im­possible to convey. They took me with them; I felt closer to God then
than I ever had before, or am likely to again.

pages 258-259

What was striking about mr jones the bio about the reporter who broke the holomodor story was the herd effect to back duranty, without evidence. Only william randolph hearst who welles libeled for his own reasons really supported him years later other former political pilgrims like muggeridge and robert conquest revisited the story

Malcolm Muggeridge was in Moscow during the Holodomor as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian. He wrote about the famine in the 1930s. He published Moscow Nights in 1934- and IIRC had to eliminate any mention of a newspaper in it due to legal action from the Manchester Guardian.

Eugene Lyons was a reporter in Moscow in the 1930s for about (IIRC) 6 years. He had the distinction of interviewing Stalin in Russian. He published Assignment in Utopia in 1937. (Lyons also published in 1941, The Red Decade The Stalinist Penetration of America.)

From Assignment in Utopia: In 1933 he found reports in the Soviet press that entire towns in the Kuban, North Caucusus had been deported. From the 1930 census he deduced that 40,000–the combined population of those towns–had been deported. Soviet censors could not stop reports of the deportations, because they had been reported in the Soviet press, but wanted numbers eliminated. Lyons circumvented that by having his report smuggled out and sent from Berlin.

My Kuban story, it thus transpired, started the first serious breach in the conspiracy of silence around the famine. The Soviet authorities, I had reason to learn, never forgave me.

Lyons pointed out that Malcolm Muggeridge was another of the reporters who were reporting about the famine.

Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian has, in his book Winter in Moscow, an unforgettable chapter on that journey; though done as broad caricature that chapter conveys the essential truth (which is the function of good caricature) : the insanity of a junket to hungerland, the correspondents chaperoned by official hallelujah-shouters, to dedicate a mechanical mammoth among wheat fields abandoned to weeds; of a holiday to glorify an electric station built in large part with coerced labor and producing electric power for factories not yet in existence.

Muggeridge himself was among the most gullible on this journey, having only just arrived from London, with all the preconceptions about Russia fostered by the paper he represented and other well-meaning liberal publications. I remember how he and another young Londoner defended their dream against the doubts and cynicisms of the more seasoned correspondents. The other Englishman died in Moscow in a tramcar accident with his illusions intact. Muggeridge lived to record his disillusionment; much of the bitterness of his brilliant book is clearly a revenge against his own imported certainties

Lyons’s book, published in 1937, also has a section on The Press Conceals a Famine.

From Muggeridge’s first volume of his memoirs. Chronicles of a Wasted Time: The Green Stick:

As I wrote in The Guardian, in the course of three articles of mine that
appeared on 25, 27 and 28 March, 1933: ‘To say that there is famine in
some of the most fertile parts of Russia is to say much less than the truth;
there is not only famine, but a state of war, a military occupation.’ The
articles were held up to follow a series by Voigt on the Terror in the
Polish Ukraine, and were run side by side with another series by him on
the Nazi Terror, by way, I imagine, of neutralising some of their effect.
In them I tried to describe it all – the abandoned villages, the absence of
livestock, neglected fields; everywhere famished, frightened people and
intimations of coercion, soldiers about the place, and hard-faced men in
long overcoats. One particularly remarkable scene I stumbled on by
chance at a railway station in the grey early morning; peasants with their
hands tied behind them being loaded into cattle trucks at gun-point (this,
incidentally, was the nearest I came to being in trouble myself; I
was angrily told to make off, which I hurriedly did, fortunately
without having to disclose myself as a foreign journalist); all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half-light, like some macabre
ballet.

Jones was not the only reporter to have reported on the famine in the 1930s, though few suffered the consequences he did.

https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/07/the-pulitzer-prize-remains-a-crown-for-left-wing-propagandists/

Sorta like a photo of the Boys at Iwo Jima reaching that spot with the Flag, looking at each other, then saying “Let’s do this,” before, you know, Actually Doing It.

Not quite the same.

Yes, the Pulitzer Prize Bastards superficially acknowledge Trump’s near-martyrdom, but instead of his unfeigned love of country in the face of death, they underhandedly glorify their own hero – the bullet they hoped might have killed him.

Peter skarsgaard was wonderfully cast as duranty james norton a possible bond was his foil. His boss david lloyd george who had a penchant for ignoring truth was also well cast

They have also refused to rescind the Prizes “For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest” on the Trump-Russia “story” (IOW, the political narrative written back when the Regime Media was still pretending that the Dossier and FBI investigation were on the level).

https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/03/why-wont-the-pulitzer-board-answer-trump-on-whether-its-review-process-is-legit-enough-to-revoke-prizes-for-russia-hoax-propaganda/

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for amplifying claims that Trump colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. Despite years of evidence proving that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for and peddled the narrative in an attempt to sic the government on her political enemy Trump, the Pulitzer Prize Board has yet to rescind any of its prizes for reporting that was based on the debunked Steele dossier.

*******
“Lillian Hellman wrote the story and screenplay.”
How can I resist referencing the familiar quote in this context?

When Mr. Cavett asked what was “dishonest” about Miss Hellman, Miss McCarthy answered, “Everything.” Miss McCarthy continued, “I once said in an interview that every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/09/18/every-word/