We’ve been down this road before—with FDR

Perhaps you believe Rush and Beck are just alarmists about the Muslims in the White House even if maybe backing the Arab Spring wasn’t such a good idea.  Ok, so maybe thousands are being slaughtered by the guys BO supported.   After all, the progressives (Democrats, Socialists, media) all say there is no problem or we shouldn’t expect their version of democracy to look like ours. But remember, that's what Communist sympathizers in the press and government said about Stalin and the USSR too in the 1930s, when FDR reigned and Ukrainians were dying at 25,000 a day from starvation.

As one of the best known correspondents in the world for one of the best known newspapers in the world, Mr. Duranty's denial that there was a famine was accepted as gospel. Thus Mr. Duranty gulled not only the readers of the New York Times but because of the newspaper's prestige, he influenced the thinking of countless thousands of other readers about the character of Josef Stalin and the Soviet regime. And he certainly influenced the newly-elected President Roosevelt to recognize the Soviet Union.

What is so awful about Duranty is that Times top brass suspected that Duranty was writing Stalinist propaganda, but did nothing. In her exposé "Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty, the New York Times's man in Moscow," S.J. Taylor makes it clear that Carr Van Anda, the managing editor, Frederick T. Birchall, an assistant managing editor, and Edwin L. James, the later managing editor, were troubled with Duranty's Moscow reporting but did nothing about it. Birchall recommended that Duranty be replaced but, says Taylor, "the recommendation fell by the wayside."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp