Media Studies

In its June 2007 issue, the monthly magazine Commentary revives the genre of gullible travels.“My Saudi Sojourn” is Joshua Muravchik’s account of his recent trip to Saudi Arabia and a servile love letter to the most benighted of all Sunni Arab regimes. “My Saudi Sojourn” might as well have been titled “Walter Duranty goes to Arabia,” after the New York Times journalist whose accounts of life in Stalin’s USSR downplayed the great miseries inflicted by the regime. Duranty spawned a journalistic genre that could be described as “propaganda tourism,” cheerful travelogues that littered American newspapers and magazines in the 1930s and painted a benign picture of Stalin’s regime.