"I have his wonderful front page," he says, leading the way up to his office via a staircase decorated with framed photographs of his journalistic adventures, family and friends. And there it is, Wilfred Burchett's scoop from 5 September 1945 with the headline "The Atomic Plague", the intro, "I write this as a warning to the world..." and the byline "by Peter Burchett". "The sub got his name wrong. Wilfred forgave him," observes Pilger. "The entire press corps of Japan were embedded and on the day he set out on this perilous journey to Hiroshima, Japan had just been defeated and foreign journalists were being shepherded to see General MacArthur receive a ritualistic sword of defeat. Burchett said, 'To hell with that, that's not the real story,' and headed the other way."
Burchett was demonised for his revelation that deaths at Hiroshima were caused by more than a bomb blast. The New York Times ran a "No Radioactivity in Hiroshima" piece and Burchett was branded a crazy leftie. The treatment echoes that meted out to Pilger following his 1970 film The Quiet Mutiny, which revealed rebellion in US military ranks during the Vietnam War.
That documentary, stemming from articles Pilger had produced for Hugh Cudlipp's Daily Mirror, was denounced by the American government, which complained to the broadcasting authorities. "I had no experience of anything like this, everything seemed to fall down around my shoulders and it was disturbing. But the story that film told became the received wisdom all over the world within a year."
Emphasis added by me.
And look what I found searching The New York Times website:
Click = big
As the economy grinds to a halt, those in charge will lie to us about the extent of the damage -- as they always have, as they always will.
Be prepared for that.
Oh, and the liar, General Farrell? He died in 1967. Of cancer.
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