The MSM has a long tradition of falling (or worse) for Communists

The Left’s Soft Spot For Communist Propaganda Is Nothing New
David Harsanyi | The Federalist
Feb 13, 2018
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[snip]

No, not every Western journalist fell for North Korean propaganda efforts at the Pyeongchang Olympics, though there were more than plenty. Some of it, no doubt, is driven by animosity for Donald Trump. Many people live a reactive existence that demands they show admiration for anyone perceived as standing in opposition to the president. The number of liberals asking “are we any better?” than North Korea on social media is horrifying, but, at this point, predictable.

But we also shouldn’t act as if embrace of Communism deception is something new or rare. The Left, and really we have no choice but to treat most big media outlets as functionaries of the Left, has a long tradition of falling (or worse) for this kind of propaganda — from Stalin to the Vietcong to Castro to Sandinistas to Hugo Chavez to fetching DPRK henchwomen.

Most famously there was the Pulitzer-Prize winning Walter Duranty, The New York Times Moscow correspondent whose dispatches covered up Stalin’s worst abominations during the 1930s. It should be remembered that many on the Left only turned away from the Soviet strongman when he allied himself with Hitler. By that time, the Soviets, who gained widespread popularity on the American left, had perpetrated their own Holocaust. To this day, the Pulitzer board won’t revoke Duranty’s prize, finding that “there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”

Many years later, the same newspaper would treat America to a series of cutesy essays diminishing the horrors of Communism called “The Red Century.” Did you know women in the Soviet Union had full voting rights by 1917? Did you know they had no-fault divorce? Guaranteed health care and job? A free education? Women in Eastern bloc countries even had better sex than Americans!

What’s more important than free health care and income equality in a “democracy?” One wonders why millions of people risked their lives to escape such utopias. “Although the Communists never fully reformed domestic patriarchy,” noted Kristen Ghodsee in The New York Times, who teaches what I imagine is advanced gibberish at the University of Pennsylvania, “Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined.”

Communist women were free to vote for the Communist candidates and then free to go to a job provided by the Communist state and then they were free to stand on long lines for food or shoes at the Communist-run shop. Self-sufficiency, indeed.

In another essay, Vivian Gornick explains the appeal of this collectivist ideology among Americans: “The Communist Party induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified.”

Unfortunately, leftism still inspires.