Associated Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and Managing Editor Brian Carovillano Each Win a Duranty-Blair Award for Journalistic Infamy

By Nicholas Stix

When I bestow a Duranty-Blair Award on a worthy media operative, I also try and give D-Bs to the guilty party’s managing and executive editor. The editors determine what is permissible material form their staffers, and are obligated to correct, retract, and/or disavow false and/or pernicious statements made by said staffers.

When I gave AP’s Julie Pace her Duranty-Blair on October 28, for lying about the Russia Game conspiracy against president-Elect and now President Trump, I neglected to similarly “honor” her propaganda bosses.

Thus, I hereby bestow on Associated Press Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and Managing Editor Brian Carovillano their very own Duranty-Blair Awards for Journalistic Infamy.

Neither propaganda boss has disavowed the acts of his operative, Pace. Should they do so, I will revoke their respective D-Bs.

The Duranty-Blair Award recognizes those journalists whose work embodies the spirit of Walter Duranty and Jayson Blair, two of the most notorious “journalists” in the history of the Fourth Estate. It is no accident that both men worked for the New York Times.

Walter Duranty wrote a series of early 1930s dispatches from the Soviet Union, where he was Times Moscow bureau chief, in which he lied about the Ukrainian Holocaust, in which Stalin deliberately starved millions of Kulaks (farmers) to death, through a man-made famine. Instead of reporting the truth, Duranty reported that the peasants were happy and well-fed, and was rewarded for his lies with a Pulitzer Prize.

Jayson Blair (here, here, and here) was an early 2000s black affirmative action hire, who alternately plagiarized reporters at other newspapers, and fabricated articles out of whole cloth, all for stories set hundreds and even thousands of miles away, while he sat in New York City cafés.

Julie Pace is the third Associated Press operative to win a Duranty-Blair, following Tom Hays in 2014, and Duncan Mansfield (posthumously) last month.

I have not given out D-Bs to Hays and Mansfield’s bosses, as I am unaware of who held the executive and managing editorships at the times of the winners’ offenses.
 

Previous Duranty-Blair winners are:

• CBS News producer Mary Mapes in 2004;

• Seven reporters and editors at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2006;

• ABC News reporter Brian Ross in 2012;

• Peter Berger (not the brilliant sociologist), of The American Interest, in 2013;

• Associated Press operative Tom Hays, in 2014;

• New York Times operative Farhad Manjoo in September, 2016;

• CNN’s Symone Sanders (2), Don Lemon, and Kate Bolduan (2), in November 2016;

• New York Times Propaganda Officer Francis X. Clines in March 2017;

• CNN Activist Jim Sciutto, in May 2017;

• Associated Press “Reporter” Duncan Mansfield (posthumous), in September 2017;

• CBS Sports operative Jack Maloney, Chairman Sean McManus, and President David Berson; and

• Associated Press operative Julie Pace, in October 2017.