Power Line News

The George Polk Awards for 2006 were announced on Monday by Long Island University. The awards seek to honor journalism in the tradition of George

» View the article

Fascinating, the “media” making much of assigning an award to their preferred leftist projects, that award based on a deceptive person. How very appropriate for them.

I’m sure that none of us here are surprised at the dearth of real journalism being highlighted.

Good grief.

And no, the New York Times still won’t give up Duranty’s Stalin-loving Pulitzer.

.

This is the sort of thing that is important to know, a little bit for its own sake and more for the sake of the light it sheds on what is possible to be true.

There is no reason to doubt the article, although I feel that Richard B. Frank doesn’t have a clue as to George Polk’s motives. Whatever they were, it is probably important for understanding what George Polk did. They are probably worse - or more cynical - than anything Frank cares to attribute to him. I feel it is highly doubtful that George Polk simply slipped into this because he once ran out of fuel.

It is clear that George Polk told different lies to different people - and was rather careful who he told what.

What’s really amazing is that he resorted to forgery. You wonder what other secrets he had and who and what kind of people he knew.

There may be even more interesting stories buried there, if you could find them out. Maybe there are clues scattered in places. I would think it affected his writing (but it won’t be too obvious)

By the way, and people probably haven’t picked up on this idea, but, as he writes, George Polk was actually a genuine war hero - clearly much more of a hero than either John Kerry or John Murtha -

AND YET HE LIED.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

(Frank thinks this is a kindness toward Polk but actually saying that Polk was a genuine war hero should put the end to any thought of giving special consideration for Kerry or Murtha.)

This deserves more attention than it has gotten. Keep this going. Never mind that almost nobody knows now who George Polk was.

One lesson to draw from this - or rather to corroborate because it is not enough to demonstrate it by itself -is this:

There are always likely to be MORE conspiracies and lies around than people think, not LESS.

If you hear something that seems credible - a very important caveat - about some politician - more bad is likely to be true, not less (and this person is more honest and upright than it appears)

Yeah,great.Lie about your service on Guadalcanal and who knows what else in Greece, and journalist’s drool at the mouth to get a Polk award. Maybe Bill Moyers could do a captivating,deep look into the camera,hushed tone piece on the phoniness of the whole thing?..nah.

Yes, it’s obvious that the prize name should be changed to the Walter Duranty Prize for Excellence and Truth in Reporting.

"Some of Duranty’s editors criticized his reporting as tendentious, but The Times kept him as a correspondent until 1941. Since the 1980’s, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures. Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize Board to cancel Duranty’s prize and The Times to return it, mainly on the ground of his later failure to report the famine.

The Pulitzer board has twice declined to withdraw the award, most recently in November 2003, finding “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the 1931 reporting that won the prize (see Pulitzer Board statement), and The Times does not have the award in its possession.”

http://www.nytco.com/company-awards-pulitzer-note.html

>>>>>Putting Spike Lee to one side, the New York Times article’s summary of the Polk Award winners makes me wonder whether journalistic excellence is necessarily the key to the award:

From “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams,” Lisa Myers, a senior investigative correspondent, and Adam Ciralsky, a producer, won the television reporting award for exposing what it called unfair preferential treatment in the awarding of a $70 million contract to Raytheon Company to develop a system to combat rocket-propelled grenades. An Israeli system had already been found to be effective. Congress is reviewing the circumstances.

The military reporting Polk went to Lisa Chedekel and Matthew Kauffman of The Hartford Courant for a four-part series, “Mentally Unfit, Forced to Fight,” detailing a high rate of suicide among American troops, many of them under the severe stress of combat in Iraq, and flawed mental health screening and treatment by the military services.

Robert Little, a national correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, won the medical reporting award for a three-part series, “Dangerous Remedy,” examining the use of an experimental blood-coagulating drug on more than 1,000 soldiers, although it had been linked to fatal clots in the heart, lungs and brain.<<<<<<<<

These stories are all newsworthy.  Are there any comments as to how these stories are false, poorly researched, or undeserving of analysis?  The comments seem to me a condemnation of Polk and not any kind of real talk about the issues raised by the journalists (war profiteering and VA services) that won.  What am I missing?

Evenkeeled, Your hiking out a little to the port(left) side. Wow, soldiers under pressure in combat kill themselves, innocents, and sometimes the enemy, that’s a first huh? Forced to fight? Hmm, might have a point there. I remember when they came for my cousin and dragged his ass out of the house tossed him in the van for the ride to the recruiting station and pummled him till he signed the enlistment papers. You need a keel extender. Here’s the skinny. Polk lied about aerial combat that other men performed and were killed doing. He lied about it to advance himself in the world, for whatever reason. He used the hereoic service of others,including awarding himself their pilot wings and ribbons, to use as an entree into a career path that would rely on his ability to report the true facts of a situation to the rest of us. Get what’s missing? It’s called character and integrity.
Now, why don’t you start there. If you create a three-part series on the many men who have done the very same thing throughout history ,and the reasons why no person should ever continue having any award for anything named after them,especially an award for journalism, when this is the origin of their adult life, well, there might be an award for you too.