Why do journalists and intellectuals whitewash dictators?

New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty took home the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union. In reality, he was a pivotal cog in Stalin’s propaganda efforts. He praised Stalin’s collectivization but ignored the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians. The damage Duranty did was not just in publishing tall tales. Rather, as his stature grew, so, too, did his access. Anne Applebaum, for example, relates how Franklin Roosevelt invited Duranty to the governor’s mansion in Albany, where Duranty gave the future president a personal seminar. Eastern Europe would pay the price.

Likewise, Edgar Snow used his bully pulpit at the Saturday Evening Post to urge the United States to embrace the Red Army and end its support for the nationalists. In Red Star over China, Snow depicted Mao more as a political reformer than a radical revolutionary. In reality, Mao was the century’s worst mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of more than 45 million, more than Adolf Hitler or Stalin. Like Duranty, Snow developed a special relationship with Roosevelt that contributed to a decision to betray Chinese republicans. However flawed Chiang Kai-shek might have been, he was not a mass murderer like Mao.

Fulgencio Batista dominated Cuban politics for a quarter-century before his ouster. He had come to power after the Sergeants’ Revolt in 1933 and found power addictive. By 1952, he abandoned any pretense of democracy and ruled with an iron fist. Enter the New York Times. In February 1958, correspondent Homer Bigart spent two weeks with Castro in the mountains with the rebels before reporting to the embassy.

“Bigart reported that there was no evidence of an anti-American bias among the people he talked to,” the U.S. Embassy in Havana cabled to Washington. Castro assured Bigart that there would be no break with America and, should he be victorious, he would cancel only “obviously bad or corrupt” contracts. As for Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Bigart assured he was not a communist but rather “a leftist and liberal.” Such reassurances percolated through diplomatic channels. Rather than recognize the warning signs that Castro was insincere and violent — Castro employed firing squads against opponents in areas his rebels controlled — Bigart contributed to a State Department conclusion that the U.S. would lose nothing by cutting off Batista, a boost that pushed the communists over the top.

Journalists also played a key role in laundering Khomeini’s image. During his short 1978 sojourn in France, the ayatollah’s handlers invited a succession of more credulous journalists to interview him. “Personal desire, age, and my health do not allow me to personally have a role in running the country after the fall of the current system,” he told the Associated Press. Khomeini assured a representative from Human Rights Watch, “in the Islamic government, all people have complete freedom to have any kind of opinion.” Princeton professor Richard Falk, assured in the New York Times that “the depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.”

This was music to the ears of many within the State Department. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter-era national security adviser, explained in his memoirs that “the lower echelons at State, notably the head of the Iran Desk … were motivated by doctrinal dislike of the Shah and simply wanted him out of power altogether.” When he returned to Iran, Khomeini abandoned all pretense of democracy, telling students in Qom, “Don’t listen to those who speak of democracy. They all are against Islam. They want to take the nation away from its mission. We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy, and such things.”

90% of intelligence is open source, and so what a foreign correspondent writes matters, even in the age of satellites and hacking. Many foreign correspondents are honest and seek to convey reality. Others, however, have agendas or trade affirmation for access. The danger for policy is when diplomats do not recognize this. For all their talk about diversity, too many diplomats are blind to the fact that they and journalists exist in the same bubbles and reflect each other’s biases. A desperate desire to advance a liberal agenda compounds blindness and often leads to the opposite.

Alas, as President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken promise to renew diplomacy, they essentially repeat the mistakes of the past by constructing a self-reinforcing bubble of like-minded journalists and intellectuals. They are too willing to convince themselves that compromising on the liberty of Russians, Chinese, Cubans, or Iranians is sophisticated. As Cubans and Iranians continue to march against their regimes, it is time Biden and Blinken humbly consider that those with whom they seek compromise can never be partners.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.