Holland Carter, The New York Times

April 21, 2009

Holland Carter
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10018

RE: The Pulitzer Prize

Mr. Carter,

Congratulations on joining the illustrious list of Pulitzer Prize winners!

I began writing to some individual winners in the late 1980s. My peak was in the late ‘90s when Sulzberger the Lesser assigned a Mr. William Borders to be his cut-out agent for my correspondence.

The reason was simple.

As long as the name Walter Duranty, the 1932 winner for Foreign Reporting –
he was stationed in Moscow - stays on the Times’s Wall of Honor it has the effect of lessening, of cheapening, every winner since him. It would have been bad enough if he had just been a “useful idiot”. That he was a bought and paid for agent of the KGB made it infinitely worse. Scratch infinitely. Insert Satanically.

He is a reason why Auden called the 1930s “a low dishonest decade”.

By his silence he and the Times acquiesced in the first European Holocaust of the 20th century. That the 6,000,000 murdered Kulaks were mostly Jews and no one cared must have inspired Hitler. When the New York Times found out they should have made a public confession, scourged themselves, and said a retroactive Kaddish for those lost souls.

Walter Duranty won his Pulitzer Prize in 1932 while he was the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times.

Frederick T. Birchall won his Pulitzer Prize in 1934 while he was the Berlin correspondent of the New York Times.

Can you imagine what the New York Times would have done if it turned out that Birchall was a bought and paid for agent of the Gestapo? A tribe of Niobes would have been insufficient for the Times to say how truly, profoundly sorry they were, are, and will be. It would have been the longest penance in history.

I write to you because this may be the last year the New York Times is a viable, ongoing business enterprise. By next year your Mexican master may start to turn your building into a homeless shelter with ex-Times employees getting preference. There may not be a building address to write to. Who knows of the Daily Mirror, the Herald Tribune, the Journal-American? A benefit of not getting TARP funds is that you won’t have Barney Frank sputtering over your advertising rates.

As an aside, and from someone who was CFO of a public company, PeeWee Sulzberger is the best single argument against inherited wealth. Too bad we can’t make Obama’s tax increases retroactive. He should be flogged. Repeatedly. And for no other reason than he gave moose a bad name.

I read last week in the Miami Herald that “art is anything you can get away with”.

The New York Times has gotten away with sins so foul it would take a Dante to give it the justice it deserves.

It is a shame it distracts from your accomplishment.