Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald

July 20, 2011

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: OOOPS! Some comments on your “Drat the rotter” analysis in today’s Miami Herald of the damage done by K. Rupert Murdoch to your sacred profession.

Mr. Pitts,
Since I am not a journalist I rather think I am not bound by the code – ill defined, flexible, and gossamer like – that ties, binds, and defines the ink stained wretches who try to make us, if not better people, certainly more informed. I suppose if I were I would be required to disclose that in a different world in the last century K. Rupert Murdoch was a partner of mine. He owned 2.857% of Bowling Green Associates, a limited partnership of which I was General Partner. Therefore I won’t.
Why limit your dudgeon to those “fabricators and plagiarizers”, AKA journalists, who have besmirched your profession in recent years? Any listing of terrible rotten liars who have doubled as American journalists must include Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent of the New York Times.
I suppose the statute has run on the New York Times supporting slavery by calling for a negotiated settlement with the South and opposing Lincoln’s reelection. Also, calling him a “baboon” falls well within the accepted limits of political speech.
What Duranty did falls into a quite different category.
Duranty was a bought and paid for agent of the Soviet Union.
His laudatory reportage was used by the Roosevelt administration to buttress their drive to recognize the USSR. He ignored the murder by starvation of between 6,000,000 to 10,000,000 Kulaks by Stalin. He reported rather the opposite. It was almost as if teenage obesity had become a problem in Odessa. Hitler noticed that the West did nothing. He became a better record keeper.
The journalists you mention – Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Chris Cecil – committed egregious acts that fell into the category “malum prohibitum”. Duranty, much beloved by the early 1930s version of modern American Liberals, is the poster boy, the paradigmatic template, of “malum per se”.
Your examples either stole from the petty cash box or cribbed some answers. Duranty’s “fabrications” led to the bloodiest 15 years in all of History.
His monstrous crime is exponentially expanded by the refusal, the 8 decade long refusal, of the New York Times either to abjure him or his award.
You say that you are “unbearably credulous”.
I don’t know whether to say “You’re young. You’ll get over it” or “Aren’t you too old to be so surprised?”
In your “How could this have happened” homily you seem to have bent some of the rules yourself.
You write “News Corp has seen its value crumble”. Au contraire. The stock price is above what it was when the scandal came public. If you want to see an example of “crumbling value” I suggest you look at the stock price record of McClatchy. It has lost 90% of its value. It still may be overpriced. All it would have taken was a quick trip to a stock quote engine. Punch in the symbols NWSA and MNI. Read them. Isn’t that what reporters are supposed to do?
The other rule is the one that infuses journalists with an overabundance of a chronic illness known as “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. That, with narcissism morphing into solipsism, allows you to proclaim that the crimes have been committed against you.
They haven’t.
You speak of your profession as a “noble craft”. If it is it is because of the people in it, not because of what they do.
“Honor and shame from no condition rise. Act well your part. There, all honor lies.”



Kevin Smith