Communist Governments and the American Media

People make wrong or foolish honest mistakes in judgement all the time. Accepting this fact can go a long way to help one from being drawn  into believing improbable or crazy conspiracy theories. Journalists and broadcasters in the traditional media deserve the same benefits of the doubt as others. However when the same people and organizations do the same things repeatedly and consistently over multiple decades, it is fair to consider that something besides coincidence or honest error is at work.

In the 1930’s while Stalin’s government was murdering millions of  Russians and other residents of the Soviet Union, starving millions of Ukrainians to death in a government created famine, carrying out  bloody purges throughout the country, and  conducting show trials where victims were tortured into confessing to often absurdly improbable or impossible crimes and then murdered, Walter Duranty of the New York Times won a Pulitzer prize for reporting that all was well in the workers’ paradise.  Duranty’s actions were far from unusual.  Whitewashing and even praising  the Soviet tyranny was commonplace among  even mildly leftist writers and journalists of the time.  A  good many agreed with the famous statement  that in seeing the Soviet Union, one had seen the future, and it worked. During  World War II journalists generally ignored both the nature  of the Soviet government and its de facto alliance with Nazi Germany  during the period of the nonaggression pact and presented the Soviets as firm allies of the United States in the struggle of free people against Nazism, when in fact they were more co-belligerents fighting the Nazis for their own reasons (which had nothing to do with anyone’s freedom) and did not participate in joint operations with American  and British forces.

In the immediate postwar years journalists routinely presented Mao and the Chinese Communists as harmless reformers who were to be preferred to the Chinese nationalists and certainly nothing to worry about.  Mao’s  later attacking American forces in Korea and killing and enslaving millions of Chinese did not prevent American journalists from treating him and his little red book as something cool and admirable in the 1960s.  The 1950s saw a media infatuated with Fidel Castro  who was also labeled as a benign reformer, and the sixties gave us the same with Ho Chi Minh. In both of these cases the natures of the regime was misrepresented, and the victims were ignored.  In the 1970s many in the media  promoted various communist or pro-Soviet dictators and governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and ignored or excused their crimes   - including even the atrocities of Pol Pot’s government in Cambodia which some in the press blamed on the United States because of its participation in the war in Vietnam .  During all this time there were continuing efforts to establish a false moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union and to sell the notion that the Soviet empire was prosperous,  successful, well managed, and invincible.

A good percentage of the people in the traditional media either were AWOL or sided at least partially with the Soviets against Reagan in the last phase of the Cold War in the 1980s. It was common to present Reagan as a dangerous warmonger or unrealistic dreamer who did not understand that the Soviets could not be beaten and to give laudatory coverage to advocates for unilateral disarmament  - meaning at that  time advocates for Soviet victory.  When the Cold War was won, Eastern Europe liberated, and the Soviet Empire and the  threat of nuclear war gone,  the line was that Reagan’s policies had nothing to do with it,  that Gorbachev just decided to give up and surrender because he was a nice guy, and the whole thing was not a big deal anyway and certainly nothing to feel “triumphant” about.  

In more recent  times, after a brief and perhaps embarrassed hiatus in the early 1990s, many in the traditional media renewed their affectionate interest in Castro’s government in Cuba and found much to admire and excuse in Chavez’s government in Venezuela and other leftist despotisms around the world.  This sort of  thing along with a revisionism on  and willful forgetting of the failures and crimes of communism in the 20^th Century continued throughout the Bush and Obama years.  Now in the last few days we have seen people from CNN, the New York Times and other outfits fawning over a representative of North Korea’s monstrous communist dictatorship.

There may not be a conspiracy  here, but there clearly is a pattern, one of a fondness or soft spot for communist ideas and tyrannies.   It happens too consistently to dismiss as accidental without considering that it might be something else.