BuzzFeed “Reporter” Who Got Zerohedge Banned On Twitter, Fired For Plagiarism Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/27/2020 – 09:20
Almost five short months ago, ‘journalist’ Ryan Broderick was the envy of his fake news peers. The BuzzFeed ‘senior reporter’ had just written a hit-piece against Zero Hedge slamming us over the ‘conspiracy theory’ that COVID-19 may have emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, and claiming that we doxed one of their scientists. Hours later, we were summarily kicked off of Twitter – a ban which has since been reversed after the social media giant admitted they were in error. Meanwhile, the lab origin ‘conspiracy theory’ has gained widespread support and is now the focus of several international investigations into the CCP lab.
Less than 48 hours after our February Twitter ban, internet sleuths discovered that Broderick had previously blogged about pedophilic fantasies involving young boys. Why he wasn’t fired on the spot is anyone’s guess. Perhaps former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith (now with the ‘Pedophilia: A Disorder, Not A Crime‘-promoting New York Times) has a soft spot for Ryan.
On Friday, Broderick was fired for plagiarism after BuzzFeed‘s new editor-in-chief, Mark Schoofs, published “A Note To Our Readers” detailing eleven instances where Broderick lifted content from other publications without attribution going back to 2013, including his hit-piece against Zero Hedge.
“BuzzFeed News has found that the following articles do not meet our editorial standards, as laid out in our standards and ethics guidelines,” reads Schoofs’ note. “As a result, the articles have been updated to more clearly attribute phrases and sentence construction to material previously published by other news organizations.”
Which is a long-winded way to say: ‘Our Senior Reporter got caught plagiarizing eleven times, so we’re doing damage control.’
Germany’s Lufthansa, the world’s fourth largest airline, received a nine billion euros lifeline, the biggest German corporate rescue caused by COVID-19 so far. This was no exception.
On June 26, for example, the Netherlands announced the details of its financial support for KLM with a bailout package worth of 3.4 billion euros.
Earlier, France announced seven billion euros worth of support for Air France.
However, as Statista’s Raynor de Best notes, this support comes at a cost for the airlines, as most European governments attach environmental conditions to their support.
This is because the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions kept growing up until 2020. Between January and June 2019, for example, carbon emissions from departing flights that originated from Austria and Finland grew by 19 and eight percent, respectively.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2CNE2NV Tyler Durden
Late Tuesday night, dozens of customers lined up outside a popular bar in Toronto. At midnight, the bar opened its doors, welcoming drinkers into its open-air patio for the first time in months after mandatory closures meant to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Given America’s close cultural, economic, and geographic links to Canada, and the fact that country has—like nearly every country to date—done a better job containing COVID-19 than has the United States, it’s worth taking a look at how Canada is reopening its food economy even as some U.S. states that reopened in part are being forced to pump the brakes due to rising numbers of COVID-19 diagnoses and hospital admissions.
Toronto, Canada’s most-populated city, is situated in the province of Ontario. It is Canada’s most populous province by a wide margin. Nearly four in ten Canadians reside in Ontario. The province also boasts more residents than its closest challengers—Quebec and British Columbia—combined.
Canada is facing many of the same challenges with its food system that Americans have been dealing with during the pandemic. Just like here in the United States, for example, while many smaller meat producers are thriving, larger meat processors have been hit by COVID-19 outbreaks among employees. Just like here in the United States, that’s hurt foreign workers particularly hard, given the fact tens of thousands of guest workers from Latin America and other countries plant, harvest, and process much of the food grown in Canada.
“Without them, Canadian farmers can’t feed us,” the Toronto Star editorial board wrote earlier this month. “There’s nothing more essential than that.”
After several Mexican agricultural workers died from COVID-19, in cases linked to outbreaks at more than a dozen Canadian farms—including a particularly severe outbreak in southwestern Ontario—Mexico announced it would halt plans to send vital workers to Canada unless the country agreed to implement steps to reduce the risk of infection among guest workers. After Ontario’s Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association recommended this week that all agricultural workers be tested for COVID-19, the province announced it would implement that step and others. Mexico and Canada reopened the worker pipeline this week.
Just as some state and local governments here in the U.S. have done, Ontario lawmakers and regulators have acted to reduce the burden of some food regulations. The province’s agriculture minister, Ernie Hardeman, has spoken before about the need to cut red tape in the food sector. To that end, Ontario lifted a ban this spring on retail-to-consumer cannabis deliveries. Last month, Ontario regulators lowered the minimum price bars and restaurants can sell on takeaway liquor from approximately $2.00 CAD per one-ounce serving to $1.34 CAD per serving.
Of course, no government body should mandate prices for buyers and sellers. But this may be what counts as progress in Ontario. After all, as I wrote in a column last year on the glacial pace of alcohol reforms in the province, decades of inadequate half-measures have been offered up as real reforms. As I noted at the time—well before the pandemic arrived in North America—the province had proposed several startlingly modest booze reforms, such as letting convenience stores sell beer and wine, legalizing happy hour advertisements and tailgating, allowing breweries, wineries, and distilleries serve all but mere samples, and letting local governments allow people to consume alcohol in public parks.
Since the pandemic took hold, Ontario has announced a host of additional measures intended to help reopening food businesses. Those steps include allowing proprietors to open new patios and expand existing ones. That process is needlessly complex.
“Normally what you’d have to do is apply up to four times a year and this would go on for 14 days at a time,” provincial attorney general Doug Downeysaid. “[T]here would be increased rules around barriers, that kind of stuff. This simplifies it.” Toronto has its own plan in place to facilitate that process, dubbed CaféTO.
But why all that red tape in the first place? Earlier this month, Canada’s National Postsuggested alcohol Prohibition in the first half of the 1900s is still engrained the nation’s psyche.
“Canadian cities [are] still dealing with a prohibition hangover from a century ago,” the paper wrote. But the Post also suggested that the pandemic may cause lasting, positive changes in the ways Canada regulates food and drink.
“Decades from now, is it possible we’ll look back on COVID-19 as a turning point in Canada’s alcohol laws, just as we look at prohibition as a turning point in the other direction?” the Postasked. We can only hope that’s the case.
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Late Tuesday night, dozens of customers lined up outside a popular bar in Toronto. At midnight, the bar opened its doors, welcoming drinkers into its open-air patio for the first time in months after mandatory closures meant to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
Given America’s close cultural, economic, and geographic links to Canada, and the fact that country has—like nearly every country to date—done a better job containing COVID-19 than has the United States, it’s worth taking a look at how Canada is reopening its food economy even as some U.S. states that reopened in part are being forced to pump the brakes due to rising numbers of COVID-19 diagnoses and hospital admissions.
Toronto, Canada’s most-populated city, is situated in the province of Ontario. It is Canada’s most populous province by a wide margin. Nearly four in ten Canadians reside in Ontario. The province also boasts more residents than its closest challengers—Quebec and British Columbia—combined.
Canada is facing many of the same challenges with its food system that Americans have been dealing with during the pandemic. Just like here in the United States, for example, while many smaller meat producers are thriving, larger meat processors have been hit by COVID-19 outbreaks among employees. Just like here in the United States, that’s hurt foreign workers particularly hard, given the fact tens of thousands of guest workers from Latin America and other countries plant, harvest, and process much of the food grown in Canada.
“Without them, Canadian farmers can’t feed us,” the Toronto Star editorial board wrote earlier this month. “There’s nothing more essential than that.”
After several Mexican agricultural workers died from COVID-19, in cases linked to outbreaks at more than a dozen Canadian farms—including a particularly severe outbreak in southwestern Ontario—Mexico announced it would halt plans to send vital workers to Canada unless the country agreed to implement steps to reduce the risk of infection among guest workers. After Ontario’s Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association recommended this week that all agricultural workers be tested for COVID-19, the province announced it would implement that step and others. Mexico and Canada reopened the worker pipeline this week.
Just as some state and local governments here in the U.S. have done, Ontario lawmakers and regulators have acted to reduce the burden of some food regulations. The province’s agriculture minister, Ernie Hardeman, has spoken before about the need to cut red tape in the food sector. To that end, Ontario lifted a ban this spring on retail-to-consumer cannabis deliveries. Last month, Ontario regulators lowered the minimum price bars and restaurants can sell on takeaway liquor from approximately $2.00 CAD per one-ounce serving to $1.34 CAD per serving.
Of course, no government body should mandate prices for buyers and sellers. But this may be what counts as progress in Ontario. After all, as I wrote in a column last year on the glacial pace of alcohol reforms in the province, decades of inadequate half-measures have been offered up as real reforms. As I noted at the time—well before the pandemic arrived in North America—the province had proposed several startlingly modest booze reforms, such as letting convenience stores sell beer and wine, legalizing happy hour advertisements and tailgating, allowing breweries, wineries, and distilleries serve all but mere samples, and letting local governments allow people to consume alcohol in public parks.
Since the pandemic took hold, Ontario has announced a host of additional measures intended to help reopening food businesses. Those steps include allowing proprietors to open new patios and expand existing ones. That process is needlessly complex.
“Normally what you’d have to do is apply up to four times a year and this would go on for 14 days at a time,” provincial attorney general Doug Downeysaid. “[T]here would be increased rules around barriers, that kind of stuff. This simplifies it.” Toronto has its own plan in place to facilitate that process, dubbed CaféTO.
But why all that red tape in the first place? Earlier this month, Canada’s National Postsuggested alcohol Prohibition in the first half of the 1900s is still engrained the nation’s psyche.
“Canadian cities [are] still dealing with a prohibition hangover from a century ago,” the paper wrote. But the Post also suggested that the pandemic may cause lasting, positive changes in the ways Canada regulates food and drink.
“Decades from now, is it possible we’ll look back on COVID-19 as a turning point in Canada’s alcohol laws, just as we look at prohibition as a turning point in the other direction?” the Postasked. We can only hope that’s the case.
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For a group famous for its caution in appearing associated with and endorsing gold, Western central bankers seem to have made an exception when it comes to sitting on the board of directors of the world’s largest bullion bank gold cartel, the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). But maybe that’s the point. Because, if central banks and their proxies are close to the action in the gold market, they will be able to control their interests, as well as influence and control others.
Which may explain why Isabelle Strauss-Kahn, former Market Operations director of the Banque de France (BdF), and formerly at the World Bank and Bank for International Settlements (BIS), is being appointed to the Board of the LBMA as an “Independent” non-executive director, with effect from 1st July. The Banque de France market operations role also included Strauss-Kahn being in charge of the French central bank’s gold and FX reserve management.
Until the Music Stops
In a classic case of musical chairs, Strauss-Kahn’s new appointment comes from a vacancy which has arisen due to the departure from another “Independent” LBMA board non-executive director, former Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY) head of FED Markets Group, Simon Potter. Potter had left the Fed in May 2019 and joined the LBMA board just last January.
But although Potter, who was also system open market account manager when at the FRBNY, had a brief stint on the LBMA, it coincided with some memorable gold market action when both the London and COMEX gold markets blew up in the week of 23 March, and when the LBMA and COMEX hit the panic button, rolling out there “nothing to see here” messages for the mainstream media.
The Other Strauss-Khan
Isabelle Strauss-Kahn, who is also a member of the advisory board of the LBMA cheerleading organization, the World Gold Council , additionally has the distinction of being the sister-in-law of the infamous Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) who many people will recognize as former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2007 until that gig was cut short by his inglorious IMF exit in May 2011. Isabelle’s husband is Marc-Olivier Strauss-Kahn (MOSK), career executive at the Banque de France, and older brother of DSK.
DSK has left the building – Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Brother-in-law DSK also knows a thing or two about gold, having been IMF managing director during the time when the IMF claims to have sold 403.3 tonnes of gold between October 2009 and December 2010 in a series of ‘off-market’ sales to the central banks of India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Mauritius ( a combined 222 tonnes), and secretive ‘on-market’ sales of the remaining 181.3 tonnes, possibly to China or to bail out bullion banks.
In fact, Isabelle Strauss-Kahn, her husband Marc-Olivier Strauss-Kahn (MOSK), and MOSK’s brother Dominique (DSK) were all living in Washington D.C. from 2008 onwards due to their respective jobs at the World bank, Banque de France US representative, and International Monetary Fund, respectively, so if gold was a frequent subject of discussion at their dinner parties, it would not have been a surprise.
MOSK was from 2008 to 2011 the “representative in America of the Banque de France” in Washington, as well as “senior visiting advisor” at the FED, as well as French administrator at the Inter-American Development Bank, a post that Christine Lagarde, then French finance minister, is said to have helped organize for him. Lagarde herself would go on to be managing director of the IMF in 2011 after DSK departed, showing the small circle in which these French central bank and monetary elites move.
Racketeering, Spoofing, Market Manipulation and Fraud
Note for the record that this LBMA Board is the same board that until September 2019 included one Michael Nowak, JP Morgan managing director and head of the bank’s global precious metals desk. Until that is, Nowak was indicted by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) for a “massive, multiyear scheme to manipulate the precious metals markets” over an 8 year period. This involved according to the DoJ, a “racketeering conspiracy”,”wire fraud affecting a financial institution, bank fraud”, “conspiracy under the RICO Act, widespread spoofing, market manipulation and fraud”. Quite a mouthful.
A series of unfortunate indictments which even the LBMA could not spin their way out of, and once again in panic mood reacted by removing Nowak from the LBMA Board a few days after the scandal blew up. So yes, this is the same LBMA Board we are referring to here.
Independent of What Exactly?
On Isabelle Strauss Kahn’s appointment to this same above board LBMA Board, Ruth Crowell, LBMA chief executive said: “We look forward to working with Isabelle, whose extensive experience in the financial services industry – specifically with central banks, will further strengthen LBMA’s global reach and independence of the Board.“
With central banks some of the main players in the gold market through their secretive gold leading, swaps and leases, not to mention their behind the scenes accumulation, distribution and repatriation of the yellow metal, the degree of ‘independence’ that influential former central bankers can have when on the board of the LBMA is debatable, to put it mildly. “Independent of what?” may be the best question, and why the secrecy?
Let’s not forget that other claimed ‘Independent’ member of the LBMA Board, the Chairman of the LBMA Board in fact, Paul Fisher, came to the LBMA in September 2016 after a career with the Bank of England, where “from 2002, he ran the Bank’s Foreign Exchange Division where he had a constructive relationship with the LBMA and developed a working knowledge of the bullion market” (perhaps a working knowledge of how to intervene in the London Fixing in the style of his predecessor “gold operator” Terry Smeeton). Fisher’s LBMA appointment at the time led to an incisive tweet from Jim Rickards which nicely summed up the move:
But with the LBMA actually established in 1987 at the behest of the Bank of England when the Bank tapped bullion banks of the likes of N.M. Rothschild, J.Aron (now Goldman), Morgan Guaranty Trust, and Mocatta & Goldsmid to formalise the London bullion bank cartel, can anyone be surprised that central bankers alumni from the three largest gold trading central banks in the world, the Bank of England, New York Federal Reserve and Banque de France, are invited onto or place themselves on the LBMA board?
Not only that but that the three people in question (Fisher, Potter and Strauss-Kahn) are all former heads of the foreign exchange and gold market departments at their central banks, and expertly versed in market operations (i.e. FX and currency interventions). What are the chances of this happening unless it was a pre-planned drive to recruit these people or else the central banks made an offer the LBMA could not refuse?
Gold to Central Bankers is like the Sun to Vampires
For a profession with a long and documented history and a vested interest in containing the gold price through gold price smoothing and stabilization operations, or as Strauss-Kahn’s predecessors at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel said “to break the psychology of the market”, the question that maybe should be asked is what are former central bankers (indeed the very heads of market operations) even doing near the gold market, let alone on the board of directors of the LBMA? Unless, shock horror, they are there to represent the interests of central banks, interests which are proven to want to scupper gold’s free market price performance.
With Isabelle Strauss-Kahn now on ‘Board” with the bullion banks, we can also ask how safe and unemcumbered are the Banque de France gold reserves, all 2435.4 tonnes of them, nearly all of which are stored in the Banque de France “La Souterraine”gold vaults, in the 8th lower basement below the Bank’s mammoth headquarters in Paris.
“La Souterraine” – Banque de France gold vaults, Paris
Given that JP Morgan opened a gold account with the Banque de France towards the end of 2018 to take advantage of the Banque de France’s gold services (which include gold lending), will those French gold bars stay safe in the silence of the Parisian vaults, or will the main security entrance of the Banque de France on Rue de Valois be now seeing more activity, as more Good Delivery gold bars flow out of the vault in security trucks destined for “liquidity and market operations”? The answer to that is that we may never know, for while central banks constantly claim to be transparent in the gold market, they are nothing of the sort, quite the opposite actually.
In October 2018, Isabelle Strauss Kahn’s first dalliance with the LBMA was penning an article for the LBMA publication the Alchemist with the misleading title of “Removing the Cloak from Central Bank Gold Operations”, which was filled with anecdotes and many words but which unsurprisingly did not remove any cloak from the gold market.
Absent were any mention of the identities of central bank gold holders at the gold storage facilities of the Banque de France, Bank of England, New York Federal Reserve and Swiss National Bank. Absent were any details of the extent of outstanding gold loans and swaps among the world’s central banks or any quantification of these loans. Absent were the identities of the bullion bank counterparties to these central bank gold loans and swaps. You get the picture. In fact nothing was revealed at all.
Shrouded in Secrecy, the London gold market, especially central bank gold operations
However, the Strauss-Kahn article ended with this nugget from the author on the subject of transparency, when she said that:
“In conclusion,while central banks may not disclose everything and must preserve some mystique, as evoked by Stefan Zweig, they should be as open and transparent as possible, and should not seek to be shrouded in mystery just for the sake of it.”
Welcome to the world of central bank oxymorons where black is white, and white is black. But a model answer for a central banker who is sure to do well on the LBMA Board and may even be asked to help draft LBMA press releases. Just put non disclosure, mystique, open, transparent, not shrouded in mystery, in the same sentence and hope nobody reads it.
The reference to Stafen Zweig (which Strauss Kahn refers to earlier in her article) is interesting however. Zweig a journalist and novelist, while visiting the “La Souterraine” Banque de France gold vault in Paris in 1932, described the French gold reserves as “the heart of our economic world, the epicentre of the invisible waves that affect markets, stock exchanges, banks”. Zweig was describing how not only gold is the centre of the monetary world, but that gold when it makes its moves, affects the entire system.
In the aftermath of the 23 March 2020 liquidity events that have sent shockwaves through the London and COMEX gold markets, and with the gold price now breaking out in US dollars terms, perhaps Strauss-Kahn and the LBMA Board are about to witness the invisible waves of physical gold that Zweig so perceptively described all those years ago in Paris when visiting the gold vaults of ‘La Souterraine’. Those interested in Stafen Zweig’s perspective can see a modern recreation of his visit to the Banque de France gold vaults here.
Plunging Aerospace And EV Demand Sends Cobalt Prices Tumbling Tyler Durden
Sat, 06/27/2020 – 07:35
Cobalt prices slumped to a 10-month low this week due to waning demand from the aerospace and electric vehicle industries – all suggest the V-shaped recovery in the global economy is nothing but a distant dream.
Airlines are slashing orders for Airbus and Boeing passenger planes as the travel and tourism industry has collapsed. In response, carriers have had to quickly reduce operating capacity by ground fleets of planes until passenger volumes recover.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun recently warned it could take 2-3 years for air travel growth to return to pre-corona levels, adding that long term growth trends could take much longer.
With reduced flights and declining orders for new planes, demand for cobalt used in jet turbine blades is expected to slump in the back half of the year.
“The harsh high temperature and pressure environments of the jet engine necessitates regular replacement of turbine blades,” CRU analyst George Heppel told Reuters. “But planes are grounded, turbine blades aren’t being used and don’t need replacing.”
Heppel estimates cobalt demand for the aerospace parts industry will be around 4,442 tonnes this year, a drop of 18% from 2019 and the lowest since 2011. He forecasts a 6,300-tonne surplus this year and global consumption around 131,800 tonnes.
The average spot price of cobalt in the U.S. stood at $15.13, down about 15% since January, hitting lows not seen in ten months. Below are global cobalt prices, prices slumped 4-5 months before the pandemic.
“The pandemic has affected demand and supply. Cobalt mined from (the Democratic Republic of) Congo is typically exported for refining through Durban in South Africa, where there was lockdown (to halt the spread of the new coronavirus), which created logistical disruptions,” said Roskill analyst Ying Lu.
Cobalt from the DRC is used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles. Much of it is exported to China, which suggests lower spot prices are the result of declining electric vehicle sales.
Weakened cobalt consumption tells us a lot about the global recovery – here’s a hint – world stocks are mispricing the shape of the recovery, it ain’t a “V” but more like a “U” or “L.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZdQvC2 Tyler Durden
The scene is Moscow, the year is 1932, and two reporters are in a venomous argument. One has just admitted to filing false stories attributing miraculous economic achievements to Joseph Stalin while ignoring the fact that he’s systematically starving peasants by the millions. Hitler, she declares, is on the march in Germany and, soon, the rest of the world, and without Stalin’s help, he’ll never be stopped.
“You sound like you work for Stalin!” the other reporter declares in horror.
“I don’t work for Stalin,” the first reporter haughtily insists. “I believe in a movement that’s bigger than any one person.”
Shuffle some names, faces and insert the phrase “moral clarity” in there somewhere, and this could be a right-this-minute conversation between American journalists. And as the remarkable and riveting Mr. Jones makes appallingly clear, the first one didn’t end well.
Mr. Jones is a 2019 Polish-Ukrainian-British film that’s been kicking around European film festivals for the past year but is getting its first real exposure this month on Amazon Prime. Directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (known for a series of movies about the Holocaust, including the Oscar-nominated Angry Harvest) from a first-time script by Ukrainan-American journalist Andrea Chalupa, it resurrects two little-remembered tales of the 1930s. One is Stalin’s deliberate infliction of a famine on the peasants of the Ukraine that killed between four million and seven million of them. The other is how Western journalists, particularly those of The New York Times, deliberately covered up the mass murder.
At the forefront of Mr. Jones are two reporters. One, Gareth Jones (British television actor James Norton), an ambitious rookie freelancer for what was then called the Manchester Guardian, is so inexperienced he forgot to bring his typewriter on the trip. The other, Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard, Wormwood), The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, is fresh off a Pulitzer prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s command-and-control economic policies.
Jones has been told Duranty is the man to see to arrange an interview with Stalin. He explains what he wants to ask: “So how are the Soviets suddenly on a spending spree? Who’s providing the finance?” Duranty is noncommittal about the interview, but does have an answer about where the money is coming from: agricultural exports. “Grain is Stalin’s gold.” He also offers some bad news—a German reporter who’s a friend of Jones and had promised to show him around Moscow has been murdered, apparently during a mugging—almost unknown in the stringently locked-down Moscow of the 1930s, particularly in the area where journalists and other necessary foreign evils lived.
Nosing around while he waits to see what will happen with his Stalin interview, Jones learns that his German friend thought something fishy was going on in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket region, which had recently been placed off-limits to foreigners, and was planning to sneak in. Jones decides to do the same, arranging a tour of a German-built factory on the other side of the Ukraine from Moscow, then ditching his Soviet minder to spend a couple of days wandering alone on foot.
Even before he leaves the train, Jones has clues that something has gone deeply wrong. When he offers to buy an overcoat from a Ukrainian passenger, the man begs to be paid in bread rather than currency. When Jones pitches a gnawed apple core into a wastebasket, another man dives into the trash to retrieve it.
But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he gets off: Stiffened corpses scattered around the train station. Corpses in empty, deserted farmhouses. Corpses stacked on carts moving along village streets. Corpses being chewed on by starving children, who afterward trill a mournful ballad: “Hunger and cold are in our house, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and our neighbor has lost his mind and eaten his children… .”
Jones is eventually picked up by Soviet security forces and returned to Moscow, where he’s warned never to tell anybody what he’s seen. The “or else” will be the life imprisonment of half-a-dozen British phone company engineers who’ve been arrested on trumped-up spying charges. As he prepares to leave, he’s ostracized by other reporters, including the sneering Duranty. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he must choose a cause greater than himself,” Duranty lectures him with, yes, moral clarity.
Back in London, Jones discovers Duranty has filed a New York Times story dismissing him as a credulous amateur. There may be a bit of hunger in the Ukraine, Duranty writes, but absolutely no famine. And anyway, what if there was? “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”
Director Holland tells this story in masterful style, playing tricks with light and shading to give Moscow a haunted and threatening look. It’s most noticeable when the scene shifts to the Ukraine and the film fades to pure black and white, painting the desiccated landscape as if she were Ansel Adams in Hell. Watching reporters hold conversations in their rooms and offices on typewriters lower their voices when a stranger approaches and flinch at any sign of interest from their omnipresent minders gives a grim and dreadfully accurate depiction of what it’s like trying to practice journalism under totalitarian rule.
Chalupa’s script is effective—she frames the issues efficiently and her characters are compelling—but less accurate. She tells a story that is absolutely true in its essentials but much less so in its more-cinematic-than-life detail. The OGPU, as the KGB was called in the early 1930s, didn’t murder reporters who got off their leashes; it simply expelled them, forcing them to leave their posh Moscow habitat for the mean streets of the Depression back home. (The name of the murdered-reporter character, Paul Kleb, suggests he was intended as an homage to Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes staffer who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004).
Jones didn’t pull any James Bond razzmatazz to reach the Ukraine; he simply bought a ticket to Kharkov, a city much further down the line, and got off early. He wasn’t arrested and he wasn’t threatened; he finished his reporting trip and didn’t say anything about what he’d seen until he got back to London. None of this contradicts Mr. Jones‘ central thesis—that the mainstream pack of foreign correspondents in Moscow in the 1930s were a pack of mewling Stalinist whores, and that the novice Jones was a better journalist and a braver man than any of them—but it’s an unnecessary distraction.
If anything, though, Mr. Jones‘ depiction of the vicious way he was treated by his colleagues is understated. The first person to reveal the mainstream journalism cabal against Jones was Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service at the time Jones was there. In his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, Lyons recounts how after Jones began writing and giving speeches about the famine, all the foreign correspondents went to a meeting with the chief Soviet censor, who ordered them to denounce the young reporter as a liar.
Lyons admits that all the correspondents knew that Jones’ stories were absolutely accurate, even though none of them had reported the famine in their own newspapers, due to “the compelling need to remain on friendly terms with the censors.” (Some of them had even discussed the details of the famine with Jones before he went on his reporting trip.) Nonetheless, Lyons wrote, they all complied, “unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. … Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstaking garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” After the deal was done, they broke out the vodka and partied well into the night.
Lyons may have been hyping his report a bit (though it scarcely did him any credit, either as a reporter or a human being) but the deliberate slander of Jones and his stories has subsequently been investigated and verified by several historians (including S.J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist, her scathing biography of Duranty; Anne Applebaum in her history of Ukrainian starvation, Red Famine; and Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin).
And Duranty (who is played with a stunningly lustrous menace by Sarsgaard) was indeed the most bloodthirsty of the bunch. The line in his story about breaking eggs to make utopian socialist omelettes is dead accurate. And it apparently became a guide post for future generations of Times reporters. Herbert Matthews, whose mistaken or mendacious—take your pick—stories on Fidel Castro helped plunge Cuba into seven decades (and counting!) of miserable tyranny, would later blithely observe of Castro’s sanguinary appetite for executions, “A revolution is not a tea party.”
Whether Duranty’s affection for Stalin was the result of ideological leanings, as Mr. Jones suggests, or just personal convenience (he had a son by a Russian mistress who would not have been allowed to accompany him if he were expelled) is impossible to say. But it was devastatingly effective. His coverage of Stalin in general and his categorical denial of any famine in the Ukraine played a key role in Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. Duranty accompanied the first batch of Soviet diplomats to Washington and got a standing ovation from the crowd at a dinner honoring them.
While Duranty lived, the Times continued to support him professionally and personally. As late as 1957, just a few months before Duranty’s death, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger wrote him a personal check for $2,500 when he complained his funds were low. In recent years, the paper has been increasingly uneasy about its old reporter, even hiring a historian to evaluate his Soviet coverage. But when the historian suggested Duranty’s Pulitzer price be revoked, the Times turned self-righteous. “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time.
I thought of that last week when the Timeseditorialized in favor of pulling down Confederate statues. The editorial approvingly quoted Nancy Pelosi: “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.” Honoring lies in support of the violence and grotesquerie of Joseph Stalin is apparently another matter.
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The scene is Moscow, the year is 1932, and two reporters are in a venomous argument. One has just admitted to filing false stories attributing miraculous economic achievements to Joseph Stalin while ignoring the fact that he’s systematically starving peasants by the millions. Hitler, she declares, is on the march in Germany and, soon, the rest of the world, and without Stalin’s help, he’ll never be stopped.
“You sound like you work for Stalin!” the other reporter declares in horror.
“I don’t work for Stalin,” the first reporter haughtily insists. “I believe in a movement that’s bigger than any one person.”
Shuffle some names, faces and insert the phrase “moral clarity” in there somewhere, and this could be a right-this-minute conversation between American journalists. And as the remarkable and riveting Mr. Jones makes appallingly clear, the first one didn’t end well.
Mr. Jones is a 2019 Polish-Ukrainian-British film that’s been kicking around European film festivals for the past year but is getting its first real exposure this month on Amazon Prime. Directed by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (known for a series of movies about the Holocaust, including the Oscar-nominated Angry Harvest) from a first-time script by Ukrainan-American journalist Andrea Chalupa, it resurrects two little-remembered tales of the 1930s. One is Stalin’s deliberate infliction of a famine on the peasants of the Ukraine that killed between four million and seven million of them. The other is how Western journalists, particularly those of The New York Times, deliberately covered up the mass murder.
At the forefront of Mr. Jones are two reporters. One, Gareth Jones (British television actor James Norton), an ambitious rookie freelancer for what was then called the Manchester Guardian, is so inexperienced he forgot to bring his typewriter on the trip. The other, Walter Duranty (Peter Sarsgaard, Wormwood), The New York Times’ Moscow bureau chief, is fresh off a Pulitzer prize for his fawning coverage of Stalin’s command-and-control economic policies.
Jones has been told Duranty is the man to see to arrange an interview with Stalin. He explains what he wants to ask: “So how are the Soviets suddenly on a spending spree? Who’s providing the finance?” Duranty is noncommittal about the interview, but does have an answer about where the money is coming from: agricultural exports. “Grain is Stalin’s gold.” He also offers some bad news—a German reporter who’s a friend of Jones and had promised to show him around Moscow has been murdered, apparently during a mugging—almost unknown in the stringently locked-down Moscow of the 1930s, particularly in the area where journalists and other necessary foreign evils lived.
Nosing around while he waits to see what will happen with his Stalin interview, Jones learns that his German friend thought something fishy was going on in the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s breadbasket region, which had recently been placed off-limits to foreigners, and was planning to sneak in. Jones decides to do the same, arranging a tour of a German-built factory on the other side of the Ukraine from Moscow, then ditching his Soviet minder to spend a couple of days wandering alone on foot.
Even before he leaves the train, Jones has clues that something has gone deeply wrong. When he offers to buy an overcoat from a Ukrainian passenger, the man begs to be paid in bread rather than currency. When Jones pitches a gnawed apple core into a wastebasket, another man dives into the trash to retrieve it.
But nothing can prepare him for what he sees when he gets off: Stiffened corpses scattered around the train station. Corpses in empty, deserted farmhouses. Corpses stacked on carts moving along village streets. Corpses being chewed on by starving children, who afterward trill a mournful ballad: “Hunger and cold are in our house, nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep and our neighbor has lost his mind and eaten his children… .”
Jones is eventually picked up by Soviet security forces and returned to Moscow, where he’s warned never to tell anybody what he’s seen. The “or else” will be the life imprisonment of half-a-dozen British phone company engineers who’ve been arrested on trumped-up spying charges. As he prepares to leave, he’s ostracized by other reporters, including the sneering Duranty. “There comes a time in every man’s life when he must choose a cause greater than himself,” Duranty lectures him with, yes, moral clarity.
Back in London, Jones discovers Duranty has filed a New York Times story dismissing him as a credulous amateur. There may be a bit of hunger in the Ukraine, Duranty writes, but absolutely no famine. And anyway, what if there was? “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”
Director Holland tells this story in masterful style, playing tricks with light and shading to give Moscow a haunted and threatening look. It’s most noticeable when the scene shifts to the Ukraine and the film fades to pure black and white, painting the desiccated landscape as if she were Ansel Adams in Hell. Watching reporters hold conversations in their rooms and offices on typewriters lower their voices when a stranger approaches and flinch at any sign of interest from their omnipresent minders gives a grim and dreadfully accurate depiction of what it’s like trying to practice journalism under totalitarian rule.
Chalupa’s script is effective—she frames the issues efficiently and her characters are compelling—but less accurate. She tells a story that is absolutely true in its essentials but much less so in its more-cinematic-than-life detail. The OGPU, as the KGB was called in the early 1930s, didn’t murder reporters who got off their leashes; it simply expelled them, forcing them to leave their posh Moscow habitat for the mean streets of the Depression back home. (The name of the murdered-reporter character, Paul Kleb, suggests he was intended as an homage to Russian-American journalist Paul Klebnikov, a Forbes staffer who was gunned down in Moscow in 2004).
Jones didn’t pull any James Bond razzmatazz to reach the Ukraine; he simply bought a ticket to Kharkov, a city much further down the line, and got off early. He wasn’t arrested and he wasn’t threatened; he finished his reporting trip and didn’t say anything about what he’d seen until he got back to London. None of this contradicts Mr. Jones‘ central thesis—that the mainstream pack of foreign correspondents in Moscow in the 1930s were a pack of mewling Stalinist whores, and that the novice Jones was a better journalist and a braver man than any of them—but it’s an unnecessary distraction.
If anything, though, Mr. Jones‘ depiction of the vicious way he was treated by his colleagues is understated. The first person to reveal the mainstream journalism cabal against Jones was Eugene Lyons, the Moscow correspondent for the United Press wire service at the time Jones was there. In his 1937 book Assignment in Utopia, Lyons recounts how after Jones began writing and giving speeches about the famine, all the foreign correspondents went to a meeting with the chief Soviet censor, who ordered them to denounce the young reporter as a liar.
Lyons admits that all the correspondents knew that Jones’ stories were absolutely accurate, even though none of them had reported the famine in their own newspapers, due to “the compelling need to remain on friendly terms with the censors.” (Some of them had even discussed the details of the famine with Jones before he went on his reporting trip.) Nonetheless, Lyons wrote, they all complied, “unanimously and in almost identical formulations of equivocation. … Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstaking garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials.” After the deal was done, they broke out the vodka and partied well into the night.
Lyons may have been hyping his report a bit (though it scarcely did him any credit, either as a reporter or a human being) but the deliberate slander of Jones and his stories has subsequently been investigated and verified by several historians (including S.J. Taylor in Stalin’s Apologist, her scathing biography of Duranty; Anne Applebaum in her history of Ukrainian starvation, Red Famine; and Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin).
And Duranty (who is played with a stunningly lustrous menace by Sarsgaard) was indeed the most bloodthirsty of the bunch. The line in his story about breaking eggs to make utopian socialist omelettes is dead accurate. And it apparently became a guide post for future generations of Times reporters. Herbert Matthews, whose mistaken or mendacious—take your pick—stories on Fidel Castro helped plunge Cuba into seven decades (and counting!) of miserable tyranny, would later blithely observe of Castro’s sanguinary appetite for executions, “A revolution is not a tea party.”
Whether Duranty’s affection for Stalin was the result of ideological leanings, as Mr. Jones suggests, or just personal convenience (he had a son by a Russian mistress who would not have been allowed to accompany him if he were expelled) is impossible to say. But it was devastatingly effective. His coverage of Stalin in general and his categorical denial of any famine in the Ukraine played a key role in Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. Duranty accompanied the first batch of Soviet diplomats to Washington and got a standing ovation from the crowd at a dinner honoring them.
While Duranty lived, the Times continued to support him professionally and personally. As late as 1957, just a few months before Duranty’s death, Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger wrote him a personal check for $2,500 when he complained his funds were low. In recent years, the paper has been increasingly uneasy about its old reporter, even hiring a historian to evaluate his Soviet coverage. But when the historian suggested Duranty’s Pulitzer price be revoked, the Times turned self-righteous. “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor at the time.
I thought of that last week when the Timeseditorialized in favor of pulling down Confederate statues. The editorial approvingly quoted Nancy Pelosi: “There is no room in the hallowed halls of Congress or in any place of honor for memorializing men who embody the violent bigotry and grotesque racism of the Confederacy.” Honoring lies in support of the violence and grotesquerie of Joseph Stalin is apparently another matter.
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