Remember Walter Duranty? We certainly do -- not personally, of course, since Duranty died nearly 70 years ago, but Duranty left an indelible stain on journalism before he left. And unfortunately, also helped establish its current model. 

Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize as the Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, whose journalistic work consisted of 'reporting' whatever propaganda suited Josef Stalin and the Soviets best. Duranty gained notoriety for 'debunking' claims of abuses by the Communists, and particularly for denying the intentional program of starvation imposed by Stalin on the kulaks of Ukraine. The famines killed millions and displaced more, all while Duranty reassuringly 'reported' on the successes of the Soviet system. 

Malcolm Muggeridge survived to help expose Duranty; Gareth Jones did not, although his work posthumously exposed Duranty as a pathological fraud. (His story was told in the excellent but overlooked biopic Mr. Jones, with Peter Sarsgaard giving a brilliant performance of the dissolute and disgraced Duranty.) Duranty won his Pulitzer for spreading Stalin's propaganda in 1931; nearly a century later, the Pultizer committee has yet to withdraw it.

Mainly, we remember Duranty because the Pulitzer committee keeps insisting on maintaining its Duranty traditions. Seven years ago, they awarded prizes to both the New York Times and the Washington Post for their reporting on Russian collusion in the 2016 elections .... which turned out to be a completely false narrative based on political dirty tricks by the Hillary Clinton campaign. They haven't withdrawn those prizes either, but at least no deaths took place except for the credibility of the organizations involved. 

And now the Pulitzers have done it again, this time in service of Hamas propaganda and to minimize real deaths and atrocities all over again. The committee awarded poet Mosab Abu Toha for his essays on the war launched by Hamas and Gaza with the atrocities of October 7. Did Abu Toha speak the truth about these atrocities and the numerous cease-fire violations conducted by Hamas and Gazans over the last 20 years? The hundreds of unarmed civilians massacred, some at a music festival championing peace? Not exactly:

The Pulitzer board awarded a prize Monday to a Palestinian poet and author who frequently disparaged Israeli hostages on social media, referring to them as "killers" and denying they were tortured under Hamas captivity.

Mosab Abu Toha was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his essays published in the New Yorker which detailed the ongoing war in Gaza. Social media posts of his, uncovered by the journalism watchdog group Honest Reporting and shared exclusively with Fox News Digital, show a frequent pattern of hostility towards the Israeli hostages, particularly the women. All posts are from 2025, with the most recent April 13.

Honest Reporting has captured some of Abu Toha's thoughts on females and babies in Hamas hands from his social media accounts, and ... "it's not pretty," to say the least. It shows just how oriented toward hateful propaganda Abu Toha actually is -- which may be one reason why the Pulitzer committee noticed him in the first place:

Toha posted the following about Israeli hostage Emily Damari on January 24, 2025:

How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’). This is Emily Damari, a 28 UK-Israeli soldier that Hamas detailed on 10/7… So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage?’

Damari, an Israeli civilian, was shot twice and abducted from her home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on October 7. Hamas held her for 471 days. But Abu Toha thinks that she cannot even be considered a hostage because she was a “soldier.”

Abu Toha also objected to some actual journalism from the BBC, which reported on the true cause of death of the Bibas children. Hamas had claimed they died in an Israeli airstrike, but the autopsy showed that both died from homicide at the hands of their captors. Abu Tooha wanted the BBC to perform an autopsy themselves before commenting on the cause of death:

Toha also cast doubt on the forensic evidence that showed that the Bibas children — 9-month-old Kfir and Ariel, 4 — were killed by their captors.

Toha posted February 21, 2025:

Shame on BBC, propaganda machine. IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said ‘forensic findings’, which have not been seen by the BBC, suggested the boys had been killed with ‘bare hands.’ If you haven’t seen any evidence, why did you publish this. Well, that’s what you are, filthy people.

Much journalism, Pulitzer judges! Very reporting!

Honest Reporting's executive director called on the committee to rescind their recognition of Abu Toha:

HonestReporting executive director Gil Hoffman released a call for the prize to be rescinded, saying, "The Pulitzer Prize is the top award in journalism and should not be blemished by bestowing it to a man who repeatedly twisted facts."

“Abu Toha justifies abducting civilians from their homes, spreads fake news, and calls lighting a Menorah on Hanukkah antisemitism. That doesn’t sound prizeworthy to me."

Hoffman's heart is in the right place, but he has it all wrong. The Pulitzers don't exist to reward excellence in actual journalism. They exist to reward those who best promote The Narrative, as selected by the progressive elite gatekeepers in the Protection Racket Media. Their prizes are for those who most notably carry the water for the Approved Figures, whether that be Josef Stalin in 1931, Christopher Steele and Hillary Clinton in 2017, or Hamas in 2025. 

And why? Because this is who and what the institutional media are. They are not reporters or honest brokers; they are propagandists and narrative water-carriers for the progressive elite. That's how the entire media industry can claim it never noticed that Joe Biden was senile even while pointing cameras as he wandered lost on stage, holding microphones while Biden babbled incoherently, and ignoring the moment when the Easter Bunny bodily ordered the Leader Of The Free World off a rope line. 

Now these same media figures are launching the Now It Can Be Told literary genre to sell books about how they might have missed that story, while Americans recognized it years before. Want to know how many Pulitzers that genre will win? All of them.

The Pulitzers demonstrate just how corrupt the media industry has become, and how resistant to change it will be. They will never change on their own; only competition has any hope of making a difference. Gil Hoffman is doing his part, but unless independent media platforms and voices can pick up on this and get the word out, the New Yorker will keep printing propaganda from and for extremists, and the Pulitzers will keep rewarding it. 

We can use as many allies as we can get in this fight. That's why it's important to support our independent platform by joining our VIP Membership program. We talk about this often, but that's because it is so critical to survival. Concerted efforts are still under way to punish advertisers, and the next government censorship apparatus is just one election away -- and ready ro be cheered and fueled by the Protection Racket Media's corrupt "fact check" and "misinformation police" efforts. 

We must choose between two paths: the Walter Duranty path and the Gareth Jones path. The Pulitzers and the establishment media have chosen the former. We must pull together to choose the latter.