Four errors, arguably five, in a single phrase. Eventually, Duranty's Soviet coverage provoked debate among his editors and readers. To its credit, the Times editorial page challenged his accounts. But in the genteel journalistic world of that era, his reporting was never odious enough to get him recalled or fired. The embarrassing Pulitzer has never been withdrawn or returned.
Fake stories live forever in journalism.
The Hughes hoax was either unusually bold or unusually stupid, since Hughes was still alive and therefore in a good position to notice that he hadn't written an autobiography. The fake diaries of Adolf Hitler could not be challenged by the alleged author, dead for almost forty years. In 1983 The German magazine Stern acquired rights to sixty-two volumes of the diaries, purportedly pulled from the wreckage of a cargo plane nine days before Hitler's suicide in 1945. British historians David Irving and Hugh Trevor-Roper helped the cause by pronouncing the diaries genuine, though both later had second thoughts. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine why anyone believed the hoax for a minute.