Walter Duranty (25 May 1884 - 3 October 1957) was a Liverpool-born Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922-1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918-1921).. In 1932, Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, eleven of which were published in June 1931.

However, Walter Duranty of the New York Times was permitted into Ukraine. He reported that there was no Famine, except for some "partial crop failures." Duranty set the tone for a good deal of Western press coverage with "authoritative" denials of starvation. He referred to the Famine as the "alleged 'man-made' famine of 1933."

In response to Jones' announcement, Durante wrote an article titled "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" in which he described the situation as follows: There appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with "thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation."