Wow. So Armstrong Williams was not the first to accept government money in exchange for creating propoganda. I can just see what happens when the neo cons absorb this information.

Wow. That (the bought journalist in the WWII story) has to be one of the most sickening and repugnant displays of sycophancy I have ever seen.

Color me nauseated.

-l.

Governments and individuals should not tell lies, should not evade the truth, and should assist it to be told. Any other behaviour is deplorable and culpable.

That was sentence one.

But the cause of telling the truth is not served with exaggerations and dissembling, either. That there were horrendous fatal and injurious consequences to the radiation caused by the bombs is a fact; but there were not 200 000 dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The closest estimate I can find is a combined total of c.70 000. I'd post a link to the article I found if I could. But try googling "casualties Hiroshima Nagasaki". More recently the Nagasaki Peace Park monument puts the number at 73884, including those from radiation.

Hiroshima's population was about 250 000, not 350 000.

Wilfred Burchett was a fine writer and a courageous reporter. He was also a convinced and doctrinaire Stalinist and a ferocious anti-American. (He was still denying Stalin's atrocities at the end of his life. That is to say, he was still flaying the United States for Hiroshima and Nagasaki while remaining utterly closed to what most historians now think was the deaths by enforced starvation of between eight and twenty million people.) Everything he wrote was coloured by his world-view, and he is not an unbiased witness.

The media's jealous of the traffic bloggers get so they use the "ethics" straw man. The media employs liars like Judith Miller but it's the bloggers who need ethics

David, this page puts the death totals of both cities so:

Hiroshima: 140,000
Nagasaki: 70,000

Total: 210,000

A year later the Times did sing a different song :-

on August 30 [1946], the Times had more to say about the article in an editorial titled "Time From Laughter:"

"Our weekly contemporary, The New Yorker, normally carries pungent comment, good reporting, able criticism and much other material that is not intended to provoke laughter. Still, in text and pictures, the laughter is usually there. This week it is not, for the entire magazine has been given over to John Hersey's account of what happened to six principal characters and about 245,000 others in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and thereafter. What happened to about 100,000 is clear. They died. What happened to the lucky six is an example of what human beings can endure and not die. Every American who has permitted himself to make jokes about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one sensational phenomenon that can now be accepted as part of civilization, like the airplane and the gasoline engine, or who has allowed himself to speculate as to what we might do with them if we were forced into another war, ought to read Mr. Hersey. When this magazine article appears in book form the critics will say that it is in its fashion a classic. But it is rather more than that."

"Your prophets have seen you for false and foolish visions; ... they have seen you for false and misleading oracles." [Lamentations 2:14, New American Standard Bible]

Adam Cohen informs us that the members of the WCTU took a Temperance Pledge. I like that kind of in-depth reporting. He's not just going through the motions, he's really digging.