Brooke Gladstone recalls when gov't and media colluded in propagating one of the most dangerous lies of the 20th century

The official position is that the [atom] bomb released no lethal radiation. Reports to the contrary are suppressed both in the U.S. and Japan.

In the New York Times, William Laurence ["Atomic Bill" was actually on the government payroll as a pro-atom-bomb propagandist] parrots the government.

"The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda, aimed at creating . . . sympathy for themselves . . . The Japanese described symptoms that did not ring true."

-- from The Influencing Machine (page 85)

Years later, [Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller, whose dispatches from the devastated target no. 2, Nagasaki, were blocked by General MacArthur's censors] says that every event has a moment when it can be understood politically. But if that moment is missed . . .

". . . the possibility of comprehension will never return again."

-- from The Influencing Machine (page 86)

by Ken

Last night I found myself in the unexpected position of more or less siding with NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg over his plan to limit sales of sugar-infested beverages in emporia under the jurisdiction of the city's health department to 16-oz. sizes, as a step toward combatting the obesity epidemic. It struck me as nice, for one thing, to see a government official in a position of authority embracing scientific (not to mention simply observable) reality.

After all, we live in a time when the bullying ascendancy of the Far Right, with its pitiless hatred of reality and its unquestioning worship of ignorance and delusion, has made it acceptable, and often mandatory, for both commentators and politicians to spew webs of anti-scientific lies. Instead of being carted off to mental health facilities for observation, the people who bray this nonsense are rewarded with honors and big-bucks employment and big bucks (media) and big-bucks payoffs contributions. (Yes, of course, standing in the background are the zillionaire commercial interests who stand to profit from the lies, and pay the liars accordingly.

In just about every area of scientific understanding of the world around us you can name, we now have an entire political party and an entire half (or more) of the political spectrum at war with reality. Reality, not surprisingly, is being routed. More power to Mayor Mike for repeatedly rejecting the conventional ignorance on a host of issues, including the obesity crisis.

BY THE WAY, A CERTAIN UPROAR CONTINUES
OVER THE MAYOR'S SUGARED-BEVERAGE PLAN

Yes, there are people screaming bloody murder about infringement on their right to sugar-saturate themselves, People should be responsible for their own choices, some voices say. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a frequent supporter of the mayor who clearly hopes to succeed him in City Hall, says what we need is education. Right, 'cause education, not to mention people being responsible for their own choices, has worked so well with the American diet -- and worked so well with, say, smoking.

Starbucks customers are apparently aghast that their beloved frappucino would fall afoul of the new regulations. I read in the paper that one of those suckers packs the sugar-and-calorie wallop of three Hershey bars. Maybe it's a good idea that the frappucino be targeted. Let people who want more than 16 ounces face up to their compulsion by being forced to buy a second, and a third, and . . .

Now, as I mentioned last night, I was approaching this latest skirmish with scientific reality fresh from what was for me a startling discovery in Brooke Gladstone's fascinating graphic not-a-novel The Influencing Machine, a stroll through the history and reality of the relationship between us and our media. It may be that I'm in fact the only person who didn't know this, but then, I can't understand why it isn't in the heads and coming out of the mouths of every schoolchild.

The easiest thing would be if you were to get hold of the book and turn to page 83, where Brooke's look back at the effect of war on the relationship between media people and government during reaches World War II. There were at least occasional exceptions to the prevailing preference for parroting official wisdom thanks to battlefield coverage by intrepid correspondents like Ernie Pyle. Except," she writes, "when the atomic bomb drops on August 6, 1945. The White House controls that story entirely."

"The government is gratified," Brooke notes, "that often the media print the official press release in their entirety," and she introduces us to "New York Times reporter William 'Atomic Bill' Laurence, longtime A-bomb advocate, now on the Pentagon payroll," who was "never on the ground in Japan" but is "on the plane that drops the bomb on Nagasaki," and watches with awe the "new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes."

"Atomic Bill" Laurence, we learn, "gives short shrift" to reports of this "radiation" stuff of which word begins to seep out of Japan -- though rarely into the U.S. media, since reporters, are barred from visiting Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and dispatches from the Pacific are ruthlessly censored by General MacArthur's censors.

As Brooke notes, the White House has already perpetrated what she describes perhaps overcharitably as a "half-truth": the claim that Hiroshima was "an important Japanese Army base." Yes, the city contained an important army base, but it was a city, and a large and important one, and, oh yes, the bomb was dropped "in the very center" of that city. She points out that it was in fact part of "U.S. policy to bomb Japanese civilian centers to undermine morale."

Now none of this is what I didn't know, though there's a fair amount of useful filling in of detail. No, we're coming now to the part I didn't know. Let's turn to (a rather poor representation of) the book. (I'm afraid these scans and images are the best I could produce even with the benefit of a couple of hours of screaming and cursing. It's surprising how minimally helpful the screaming and cursing are if you really don't know what you're doing. I can report, though, that if you click on the graphics, they enlarge in such a way as to become eminently readable.)

[Again, by all means click to enlarge.]

Did you catch that?

"The official position is that the bomb released no lethal radiation. Reports to the contrary are suppressed both in the U.S. and Japan."

Then there's "Atomic Bill," the great authority on the atom bomb:

"The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda, aimed at creating . . . sympathy for themselves . . . The Japanese described symptoms that did not ring true."

And now we have a reporter whose debilitating experience with U.S. censorship of reality led him to formulate a theory about the very limited window that exists for making unpleasant realities understood by the public.

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

Suddenly I understand a lot better why The New Yorker's chose to devote that entire issue in August 1946 issue to John Hersey's Hiroshima, and why it caused such a sensation. Our government had been trying to perpetuate the appalling fiction that atomic radiation was a myth, some kind of Japanese propaganda -- perpetuated with the glad assistance of media whores who had never been anywhere near either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, or done anything to find out what had actually happened there.

As The Influencing Machine documents generously, there's nothing the least novel about large segments of the public believing lies. On the contrary, she shows us, it happens all the time, and always has. But jeez, when we consider that our government did everything in its power to pretend that there was no such thing as a problem of radiation connected with atomic power, why should we be surprised that our government, say, lied to us about Iraqi WMDs -- or, well, who knows what else?

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