Bought journalism, circa 1945

From the history file, a little reminder that seeing reporters being used by those in power to attack folks and stories they don't like is nothing new. Amy and David Goodman are petitioning the Pulitzer board to revoke William L. Laurence's prize over just such shenanigans, at the end of World War II.

Laurence covered the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disputing the accounts of the entirely ballsy independent reporter Wilfred Burchett out of Hiroshima on the horrors of radiation poisoning. Burchett, who rode a train for 30 hours, and then walked into what remained of the city, published in the London Daily Express.:

In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly—people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.

Laurence, in the pages of the New York Times, disputed this, dismissing it as Japanese propaganda. It later emerged Laurence was on the pay of the war department.

There is nothing controversial about the notion of radiation poisoning today, for the record.