March 22, 2006
Washington (CNSNews.com) - Castigating the press for "journalistic
crimes" committed during its reporting on the Balkans wars of the
1990s, retired New York Times reporter David Binder claims the 1993
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting awarded to both the Times
and New York's Newsday "should, in all fairness and honesty, be
revoked."
Binder was speaking at a press conference for the release of a new book
criticizing the war reporting. Binder wrote the foreword to the book by
Peter Brock, titled "Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and
Tragedy in Yugoslavia."
"What we're looking at here is a series catalogued by Peter Brock of
journalistic crimes," said Binder. Before mentioning the reporting of
the Times' John F. Burns and Newsday's Roy Gutman, Binder evoked the
memory of what he called Walter Duranty's "phony reporting" for the New
York Times in the 1930s as an example of an undeserved Pulitzer.
Duranty was criticized for having been too deferential to Joseph Stalin
and his plan to industrialize the Soviet Union.
"What Peter [Brock] has unraveled and disclosed in this book involves
at least a couple of Pulitzer prizes that should in all fairness and
honesty be revoked." Binder confirmed to Cybercast News Service that he
was referring to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting,
awarded to Burns of the New York Times and Gutman of Newsday for their
reporting in the Balkans. Brock devotes considerable space in his book
to criticizing the reporting of Burns and Gutman.
Binder noted that the Times has gone through "agony" in recent years
over the "terrible professional behavior of its staff members" and with
"what has gone on under its masthead."
"[E]xposure is the best remedy," said Binder.
"I think Peter Brock's book helps a great deal to confront these
egregious crimes of journalism. I think it should be shoved under the
noses of editors all across the press, at least the editors who are
dealing with foreign news ..." said Binder.
The Pulitzer Board at first voted to award the prize solely to Gutman,
according to Binder. "The New York Times got so agitated that John
Burns was passed over that they started lobbying the board. The
Pulitzer is an extremely political award in many if not all cases.
There are all kinds of backstage manipulations that go on."
The centerpiece of Burns' Pulitzer entry was a seven-hour interview
with a captured Bosnian Serb -- Borislav Herak -- who in graphic
statements to Burns, confessed to dozens of murders, including eight
involving rape. Burns' Nov. 27, 1992, article was described by the New
York Times as offering "insight into the way thousands of others have
died in Bosnia."
However, more than three years after the publication of Burns' story,
the Times on Jan. 31, 1996, described Herak as "slightly retarded" and
reported that Herak had retracted his confession and claimed it had
been beaten out of him by guards.
"I was tortured, forced to confess," said Herak. By that time his
testimony already had been used to convict Sretko Damjanovic for the
killing of two Muslim brothers who were later found alive. Both Herak
and Damjanovic, who also said he had been "tortured" into providing a
false confession, were sentenced to death by firing squad.
Author Peter Brock described Burns' interview with Herak as "a
manipulated confession and interrogation in which Burns was the key
participant." Brock faults Burns for failing to tell readers that the
interview took place with a Sarajevo video production crew present and
that "interrogations were conducted by [government] investigators and
by Sarajevo film director Ademir Kenovic."
He also argues that "vital pieces" of Herak's story were missing.
"[T]here was no evidence, corpses or victims, or eyewitnesses to
implicate Herak, except for hearsay from Bosnian government
'investigators,'" Brock writes.
Brock also faults Newsday's Roy Gutman for being unduly influenced by
government propagandists including one source who operated under four
different aliases. Gutman was criticized for not exercising enough
scrutiny before repeating allegations of atrocities and statistics of
the dead and tortured.
Gutman won his Pulitzer partly for "electrifying stories about
'concentration camps'," notes Brock, who criticizes the reporter for
the prominence of "hearsay" and "double hearsay" in his stories, as
well as gratuitous use of the language of the Nazi Holocaust.
Gutman's first five stories about the alleged Omarska concentration
camp in Bosnia were actually filed from Zagreb, in Croatia, Brock
complains. It was Gutman's sixth story on the subject that finally
carried an Omarska dateline, Brock wrote, and that was after the prison
had been shut down.
Both Binder and Brock accuse the press of falling into "pack
journalism" and playing the role of "co-belligerent." The reliance on
Croat and Bosnian Muslim propaganda resulted in distorted reporting
that exaggerated the Serb role in the three-sided conflict and ignored
ethnic cleansing of Serbs, according to Binder and Brock.
Brock went so far as to say the $3,000 Pulitzer Prize money awarded to
Burns and Gutman was "blood money."
"What we're talking about in terms of what I call crimes of journalism
was only ten years ago," said Binder. "It wasn't so long ago that
these, I think revolting things, were happening -- revolting bias,
revolting suppression of other sides of the story."
During his recent appearance at the National Press Club in Washington,
D.C., Binder said it would take "at least a decade" before historians
"clear out that wretched underbrush of lies and concoctions" from
"despicable" politicians "like Richard Holbrooke," an international
negotiator during the administration of former President Bill Clinton
and "certainly the journalists" criticized in Brock's book. The rise of
blogs and media watchdog groups offers a "corrective" for the public
now, Binder contended.
In his call for the revocation of the Pulitzer Prize Peter Brock said
that "in all fairness, if [the Pulitzer board] is not going to revoke
the prize, they ought to give Janet Cooke's Pulitzer back." Cooke was a
Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for a fabricated 1980 story
about an eight-year old heroin addict.
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