After watching Agnieszka Holland‘s film Mr. Jones on Amazon Prime, I highly recommend it to every journalist at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other liberal media outlets. I especially recommend it to those working at my former U.S. federal government employer, the Voice of America, the largely unmonitored and unaccountable state broadcaster funded by American taxpayers who are generally unaware of its existence.
It may come as a shock to most people that, until a few months ago, VOA employed a reporter who had earlier produced Russian propaganda videos with anti-U.S. conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic themes. The former Obama administration holdover management was also responsible for firing anti-communist journalists who wanted to expose China’s influence operations in the United States. In fact, VOA editors later aired videos with the Chinese regime’s propaganda.
Under the previous management, which was replaced only a few weeks ago by new Trump-appointed CEO Michael Pack, the VOA also featured American communist Angela Davis, the 1979 Lenin Peace Prize winner, presenting her as a defender of human rights. In 2018, VOA editors posted a sympathetic Reuters report on communist revolutionary Che Guevara that did not mention any of his victims.
Watching Mr. Jones confirmed my long-standing belief that not most but a disturbingly large percentage of mass media scribes, especially when they join a group blinded by ideology and/or partisanship, can become self-righteously dangerous enemies of facts. Let’s not forget that the Soviet Union had its own army of journalists and that Vladimir Putin’s Russia and communist China still do, including some people from the U.S.
Holland’s film, a Polish-Ukrainian-British co-production, is about Gareth Jones, played in the movie by English actor James Norton. In real life, Jones was a courageous young Welsh reporter in pre-World War II Moscow, among hordes of Western correspondents who at that time were “pimping for Stalin with disgusting single-mindedness,” to use a phrase made known by British anti-Nazi and anti-communist writer and journalist Rebecca West.
West was describing not journalists per se but Western European and American intellectuals who were seduced by Marxism. They were all, however, members of the same club.
The main villain in Mr. Jones is Walter Duranty (played by Peter Sarsgaard), the New York Times Moscow bureau chief whose 1932 Pulitzer Prize was never revoked despite his now well-established record of lying in support of the Soviet regime. It was the young and less experienced Gareth Jones who stood up against the crowd to get to the truth and to expose it. He went by train from Moscow to Ukraine and reported in horrifying details on the Holodomor, the deadly famine caused by Stalin and implemented by the Communist Party that claimed several million lives, mostly Ukrainian peasants.
Ironically, the New York Times, the same newspaper that for decades defended Duranty, is now defending substandard reporting by VOA under the former Obama era management and criticizing what Michael Pack says are his attempts to reform the organization as an attack on the free press.
Like nearly all Americans, New York Times and Washington Post journalists today have no idea that pro-Kremlin fellow travelers were also in charge of the Voice of America in the early World War II years. The first VOA chief news writer and editor was best-selling author Howard Fast, who later joined the Communist Party and in 1953 received the Stalin Peace Prize. Fast and the man who recruited him, the extreme left-leaning first VOA Director John Houseman, (who later became a Hollywood actor) were quietly eased out in 1943 and 1944, but others blinded by their love for communism continued to cover up Stalin’s crimes and helped him establish control over Eastern Europe with their pro-Soviet VOA propaganda. They were eventually replaced by anti-communist refugee journalists, but not until the late 1940s and the early 1950s. A few of the early VOA communists went to work for Soviet-imposed regimes.
Subsequent VOA directors pretended none of this had happened. Eventually, most did not even know or remember what had really transpired in VOA’s early years. At that time, VOA and its parent agency had only a few honest journalists of the Gareth Jones type. Unfortunately, they initially lost the fight with Stalin’s supporters.
One of them was Julius Epstein, who had worked as an editor on the German Desk of the Office of War Information, which was then VOA’s parent agency. Epstein was a Jewish refugee from Austria who in his youth had briefly been a Communist Party member. He left the party and became a lifelong critic of communism. In his journalistic career, he was a freelance correspondent for several Swiss, French, English, and American newspapers and a published author. Epstein was laid off by OWI in 1945 — most likely because he dared to point out to his superiors that news reports about Stalin being a mass murderer were almost certainly true. But he did not go public with his concerns until after leaving the agency. When he contacted members of Congress, he was harshly denounced by one of the early VOA directors as an ungrateful immigrant unworthy of his newly acquired U.S. citizenship.
Another World War II journalist who also battled with the Voice of America management over the cover-up of Stalinist crimes was a young Polish radio broadcaster Konstanty Broel-Plater. He resigned in 1944 from his broadcasting position after being told to read on the air Soviet propaganda he knew to be lies, but there were very few journalists such as Epstein and Broel-Plater at VOA in its early years.
It is worth noting that not just Duranty but most of the Western correspondents in Moscow, who knew about the famine in Ukraine in the 1930s but did not report on it, denounced Jones as an amateur and a liar. Holland noted at the end of the film that in 1935, Jones went on a reporting trip to Inner Mongolia, where he was kidnapped and killed shortly before his 30th birthday. There were speculations that his death may have been arranged by the Soviet secret police.
Ted Lipien is a former acting associate director of the Voice of America and the former VOA Polish service chief during Solidarity’s struggle for democracy in Poland.
