Everybody makes mistakes. However, the NYT has NEVER admitted THIS ONE.
http://www.nytco.com/company-awards-pulitzer-note.html
Walter Duranty was on Stalin's payroll and had his lies published by the NYT. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for his propaganda.
http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford050703.asp
http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/duranty43.htm
Walter Duranty, who reported from the Soviet Union for The New York Times between 1922 and 1941, is probably the most tainted scribe in that newspaper's long history.
In fact, such is the enormity of the correspondent's misreporting of events in Stalin's Russia in the 1930s, and so great was his influence, that he probably would qualify for worst reporter of all time were there such an award. No picayune plagiarist he, Mr. Duranty helped cover up a genocide: Stalin's deliberate killing by starvation of as many as seven million Ukrainians in 1932-33.
http://www.orwelltoday.com/stalinliar.shtml
If the NYT had a gram of integrity, it would give back the Pulitzer Prize and apologize to the World for publishing lies as fact. It doesn't, so it won't.