Talk:Council for the Defense of Freedom

I've deleted the following paragraph from this article:

However, The New York Times newspaper is, to no one´s surprise, a bulwark of the Leftist journalists in this country. As an obvious example of this latter fact, which the Left tries hard to hide, is Stalin´s Timess man in this country, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for blatant Stalinist propaganda, according to Ann Coulter´s book, "Treason." In her book, she also reports The New York Times´s stubborn insistence in the "innocence" of convicted Stalinist spy and Pres. Roosevelt´s close confidant, Alger Hiss, against a forty year track record of incriminating, solid evidence of his guilt. She adds: "Almost fifty years later, the release of the decrypted Soviet cables proved indisputably that Hiss was a Soviet spy, sending a shock wave through the New York Times building."*

Aside from the fact that Ann Coulter's own scholarship is bad, this is an article about the Council for the Defense of Freedom, not Walter Duranty or the New York Times. I would have no problem with a SourceWatch article about Duranty, who was by everyone's account an uncritical apologist for Stalin's regime. The Times itself has said as much. However, Duranty was a reporter for the Times in 1932, and it is simply absurd to judge the entire newspaper on the basis of one journalist who worked for them more than 70 years ago. As for Alger Hiss, it's not at all true that the Times maintained a "stubborn insistence in his innocence," either at the time of his trial or more recently. Here, too, moreover, we're talking about events that happened more than half a century ago. Distorted history from a 50+ years ago is absurdly weak evidence for alleging to the Times is "a bulwark of the Left," and it is simply false to claim that "no one" is surprised by this claim. I, for one, disagree with it. --Sheldon Rampton 22:59, 16 Feb 2005 (EST)