Mr. Jones: how fake news helped cover up the Ukrainian genocide

The story of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones deserves to be more widely known. Accordingly, the film Mr. Jones erects a cinematic monument to his memory.

Jones travelled to Moscow in 1933 and discovered that Joseph Stalin was starving millions of people. The foreign press corps actively failed to report on this truth, allowing themselves to be used by Stalin in a cover-up.

Close to four million Ukrainians were murdered in this act of deliberate starvation, now known as the Holodomor. But Jones evaded his Soviet handlers and travelled to Ukraine to witness the policy in action.

The movie, now available on demand digitally, tells the story of this heroic act of journalism.

Directed with a sure hand by the great Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the film also rises to the occasion of its serious subject matter by using a complex and ambitious screenplay written by Andrea Chalupa.

James Norton is the actor who brings Jones to life. The movie has many great scenes, but one important one happens as Jones looks into the recent death of a friend in the country.

In it, he lays bare his core principles to Ada Brooks (played by Vanessa Kirkby) during the course of a spirited debate with her.

“I don’t have an agenda,” says Jones, “unless you call truth an agenda.”

“Yes, but whose truth?” she asks.

“The truth. There is only one kind,” he insists.

“That’s so naïve,” she opines.

His reply sums up the philosophy to which his life bore witness: “Journalism is the noblest profession. You follow the facts, wherever it leads. You don’t take sides.”

Yet, as the movie portrays so well, Walter Duranty of the The New York Times, who was their correspondent in Moscow from 1922 to 1936, won the Pulitzer Prize for spreading the lies and propaganda that the Soviets wanted.

It was fake news about a fake economy. It earned Duranty fame and fortune. Jones, however, was murdered in Mongolia in 1935. While on another reporting trip, it appears the Soviets had their revenge.

Back in 1933, Jones was seeking to interview Stalin. The Soviet economic miracle didn’t add up, especially since the rest of the world was reeling from war and depression.

In the film, Duranty (portrayed by Peter Sarsgaard) informs Jones that grain is Stalin’s gold. Indeed, it was, but as Jones discovers in his trip to Ukraine, it was grain stolen from the mouths of millions of human beings. They were deliberately starved to generate the illusion of a booming economy elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

When Jones published his report, it inspired George Orwell to write his famous novel Animal Farm. Using Orwell to frame her screenplay, Chalupa begins the movie with Orwell at his typewriter, wanting to tell “a story so simple even a child could understand it. The truth was too strange to tell any other way.”

It’s a nice signal to the viewer to be prepared for a truly strange story, a different and uncomfortable movie.

“The world is being invaded by monsters, but I suppose you don’t want to hear about that,” laments Orwell (played by Joseph Mawle). He muses that in another life he could be writing successful romantic entertainments instead.

Orwell and Jones are thus contrasted by Chalupa, later in the film, with people like Duranty, who sell their souls to give people, not the truth, but merely what they want.

The movie takes up the difficult task of communicating “the story of the monsters” (to use Orwell’s words at the outset). Orwell is shown choosing to do so “through talking farm animals,” because “maybe then you will listen, then you will understand.”

Thus, in Animal Farm, we have an entertaining and memorable satire of communist indoctrination and rationalization for genocide: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

In his novel 1984, Orwell gave this mental acquiescence to lies and contradictions a satirical name: “doublethink.”

In Mr. Jones, we are denied the satisfaction of savouring witty satire. Instead, the perennial need for real journalism, committed to facts and truth, becomes the film’s urgent theme.

Giving voice to it, Mawle’s Orwell says: “The future is at stake, so please read carefully, between the lines.”

Some might consider such passionate sentiments about journalism “naïve” (as Ada does). Yet the film’s uncomfortable task is to show the real-world consequences of such cynicism: literally millions of lives.

Because Jones had successfully interviewed Hitler on an airplane, he ventured to Moscow to interview Stalin and pursue the truth.

From his Hitler interview, he realized, long before most, the terrible danger the Nazis presented at the time of the Reichstag fire.

So too with the Holodomor: Jones learned the truth long before people were willing to admit it.

That’s why freedom of the press is so important, so that the truth can be published.

“War begins in the minds of men,” says Norton’s Jones. Which is exactly why we need the truth, to defeat the disease of doublethink and propaganda, before it kills millions.