The New York Times told its readers in 1936 that Stalin's Moscow show trials were legitimate legal proceedings. Walter Duranty had already spent years laundering Soviet atrocities through the paper's pages, and the pattern held: the Times reported the confessions of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other defendants as genuine admissions of guilt. Every single defendant had been tortured. NKVD interrogators used sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against family members to extract confessions to crimes that never happened. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 within days of their sentencing. Stalin bears responsibility. But so does a press institution that chose ideological sympathy over basic skepticism, and paid no price for that choice. The Times won a Pulitzer in 1932 partly on Duranty's work. It never returned that prize. This is what state power without accountability produces: mass murder dressed up in courtroom procedure, and credentialed journalists applauding the costume. You are living with the downstream consequences of a media culture that learned it could cover for state violence and face no professional reckoning. The incentive was set then, and it has never fully reversed.