All the Dupes Fit to Print: Journalists Who Have Served as Tools of Communist Propaganda

“All the news that’s fit to print.” That, of course, is the longtime motto of the New York Times, even as its pages for decades have featured the often questionable work of the likes of Walter Duranty and Herb Matthews, two reporters whose woefully misleading puff pieces on the likes of Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro served as fodder for the Communist Party line, a line that ran from Moscow to Havana to, strikingly enough, Manhattan, where the headquarters of the Times sat not far from the headquarters of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the Daily Worker. While the Times has always been liberal/“progressive,” and certainly not communist, readers could be forgiven for occasionally noticing lines in the Times not wildly different from the party line at New Masses or even Pravda. And when the Times did seem to toe the party line, it was not usually intentional; rather, it was usually a byproduct of well-intended liberal/progressive reporters being successfully misled by not-so-well-intended communist handlers. That, in fact, is what being duped is all about.