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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Photograph from Atomic Veterans History Project, taken by Henry Dittmer in October 1945 as his unit
debarked and toured the ruins of Hiroshima.
"A month after the bombings [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki], two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima."Good stuff via Democracy Now by Democracy Now host, Amy Goodman and fellow journalist David Goodman, who have published an article in the Baltimore Sun describing the trials of journalists attempting to cover the bombing who's reports were dismissed as propaganda and censored outright by the US military. The Goodmans are also calling for the retraction of a Pulitzer Prize awarded to "embedded" New York Times journalist William Laurence:
Mr. Laurence had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people. His news story included this remarkable commentary: "The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. ... Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."
Mr. Laurence won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the atomic bomb, and his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb. It is time for the Pulitzer board to strip Hiroshima's apologist and his newspaper of this undeserved prize.
Sixty years late, Mr. Weller's censored account stands as a searing indictment not only of the inhumanity of the atomic bomb but also of the danger of journalists embedding with the government to deceive the world.