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https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4a718d-6128-83e8-b40c-9008c21fb0e3

Prompt

Can you tell me about the history of control and ownership of the New York Times since the 1920s to present day? Separate item, did they ever apologize or acknowledge their lack of journalism for the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor in Russia during the 1930s as dramatizied by the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Jones_(2019_film). I’m wondering if the same people who ran the NY Times in the 1930s are the same today.

Response

Ownership and control: 1920s to today

The basic answer is yes: the same family line has controlled The New York Times continuously since well before the 1920s. It is not the same individuals, of course, but it is substantially the same ownership dynasty: the descendants of Adolph S. Ochs, through the Ochs-Sulzberger family and its trust.

The corporate structure has changed, but not the family’s control. The Times Company is publicly traded, and ordinary investors mainly own Class A shares. The family trust holds about 95% of the unlisted Class B shares, which elects 70% of the board and controls matters not requiring a Class A vote. Thus the company is public in an economic sense, but remains family-controlled in governance. (SEC)

A.G. Sulzberger has been publisher since 2018 and chairman since 2021. The company’s CEO is Meredith Kopit Levien, but the family retains the decisive board-control mechanism. (SEC)

So, stated precisely:

The people running the Times in the 1930s are not the same people today, but today’s controlling family is directly descended from the people who controlled it then.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher during the famine coverage, was Adolph Ochs’s son-in-law. A.G. Sulzberger is Ochs’s great-great-grandson.

The Holodomor and Walter Duranty

The principal Times figure connected with this failure was its Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. His dispatches minimized, denied, or obscured the Soviet famine of 1932–33, including the famine in Ukraine now generally identified as the Holodomor.

Most notoriously, in March 1933 Duranty wrote under the headline “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving,” attacking reports of famine and dismissing the reporting of Gareth Jones. Later that year he characterized famine reports as exaggeration or malicious propaganda, while nevertheless acknowledging severe food shortages and major mortality in affected regions. The contradiction is one reason the reporting has been condemned so strongly. (Wikipedia)

Duranty had already received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for correspondence, based on articles from 1931 about the Soviet Union rather than specifically on the 1933 famine dispatches. That distinction later became important in the Pulitzer Board’s refusal to revoke the award.

Did the Times apologize or acknowledge it?

It has acknowledged the failure very clearly, but I do not find evidence of a straightforward institutional apology in the form “The New York Times apologizes for its Holodomor coverage.”

The strongest formal acknowledgment came in 2003, when the Pulitzer controversy was reopened. The Times commissioned Columbia historian Mark von Hagen to examine Duranty’s work and transmitted his assessment to the Pulitzer Board. Von Hagen concluded that Duranty’s reports were unbalanced, uncritical, and excessively repeated Stalinist propaganda. The Times’s then-publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., described Duranty’s work as “slovenly” and said it should have been recognized as such by the Times editors and Pulitzer judges decades earlier. (Wikipedia)

That was an acknowledgment of serious editorial and journalistic failure, including an implicit admission that Times editors had failed in their responsibilities. It was not quite a full apology to Ukrainians or to the famine victims.

The Pulitzer Board independently concluded that Duranty’s work “falls seriously short” by modern standards, and said its view was similar to that of the Times. However, it did not revoke the Pulitzer because it said it lacked “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the specific 1931 articles that won the award. (The Pulitzer Prizes)

That conclusion remains controversial. Critics argue that the Board’s narrow focus on the 1931 prize submissions avoided the larger question: Duranty’s overall Soviet reporting, particularly his 1933 famine coverage and his public undermining of Gareth Jones.

Relation to Mr. Jones

The film is dramatized, so it should not be treated as a documentary transcript. But its central historical conflict is real:

• Gareth Jones did report on mass starvation in Soviet Ukraine.
• Duranty’s Times reporting helped discredit or neutralize famine reporting in influential Western circles.
• The Times later acknowledged that Duranty’s work was profoundly deficient.
• The Pulitzer was not rescinded.

A fair concise characterization would be:

The Times did not merely fail to notice the famine. Its most influential Moscow correspondent actively helped minimize and discredit reports of it, and the paper’s editors failed to correct or challenge him adequately.

That is why the issue remains attached not only to Duranty personally, but to the institution and its then-family-controlled management.

The modern Times is therefore not controlled by unrelated later owners who inherited a brand. It is still controlled through the same Ochs-Sulzberger lineage that controlled it during the 1930s, although the current generation has publicly characterized the Duranty work as shameful and deficient rather than defended it.

Prompt 2

Has the New York Times every apologized for deficient coverage or something more than a small error?

Response 2

Yes. The New York Times has, on several occasions, done far more than print a routine correction. Its strongest responses have included large-scale retractions, internal investigations published for readers, staff discipline or resignations, returning awards, and explicit acknowledgments of serious editorial failure.

A few clear examples:

• Jayson Blair fabrication scandal, 2003. After discovering that reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated, plagiarized, or otherwise falsified material in many articles, the Times published an unusually extensive front-page investigation and several pages documenting the failures. The episode led to the departures of Executive Editor Howell Raines and Managing Editor Gerald Boyd. This was institutional self-examination on a scale far beyond a correction. (dokumen.pub)

• “Caliphate” podcast, 2020. The Times concluded that central claims in its high-profile ISIS podcast could not be substantiated and that the work had not met its accuracy standards. It placed an editor’s note on the series, reassigned reporter Rukmini Callimachi away from terrorism coverage, and returned the Peabody Award the project had won. Executive Editor Dean Baquet described the parts concerning the central source as, in substance, a retraction. (The Washington Post)

• Sarah Palin editorial, 2017. The Opinion section published an editorial that incorrectly implied a factual link between Palin’s political-action committee and the 2011 Tucson shooting. The Times corrected it promptly, and former editorial-page editor James Bennet later publicly apologized in court, saying he had “blew it.” That was a serious individual apology, though it concerned a specific editorial rather than a broad coverage failure. (AP News)

• Walter Duranty and the Soviet famine/Holodomor. The Times has made an unusually harsh retrospective acknowledgment. In 1990, an editorial-board member wrote that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” In 2003, when the Pulitzer Board reconsidered Duranty’s 1932 prize, the Times commissioned historian Mark von Hagen to assess the reporting and sent that assessment to the board; publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. reportedly called the work “slovenly” and said its defects should have been recognized at the time. (Wikipedia)

But on your narrower question—did the Times ever plainly apologize to Ukrainians, famine victims, or readers specifically for its deficient Holodomor coverage?—I do not find evidence of a formal institutional apology in the ordinary sense: “We apologize for our coverage.” Its response has been condemnation and repudiation of Duranty’s work, not an unambiguous apology or a formal retraction of the historical coverage. The Pulitzer Board also declined to revoke the 1932 prize, saying the specific 1931 submissions did not meet its standard of clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, even while acknowledging that Duranty’s famine reporting was “gravely defective.” (The Pulitzer Prizes)

So the fair formulation is:

The New York Times has occasionally made substantial institutional admissions and retractions when its own reporting collapsed—Jayson Blair and Caliphate are strong examples. For Walter Duranty and the Holodomor, however, it has acknowledged the reporting as among the worst in its history, but has not issued a clear, direct institutional apology comparable to those modern accountability episodes.