Government Censorship And Persistent Journalists

Governments suppressing stories that make them look bad are not new.  When my son taught in China he mentioned one day that the Chinese have a better sense of the news than Americans because the Chinese KNOW that what they read is not true.  Here's a story from the Washington Post about writer John Hersey going to Hiroshima in 1946 to tell the, up to then, suppressed story of the human suffering caused by the atomic bomb.  

The U.S. hid Hiroshima’s human suffering. Then John Hersey went to Japan.

"Hersey and [his editor] Shawn suspected that the U.S. government’s wartime propaganda machine had covered up the human suffering of the atomic bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago this month. Pictures from Japan showed destroyed buildings and decimated neighborhoods, but little was known about the human toll, especially from radiation.

The U.S. government controlled access to the bomb sites. The War Department quietly asked American news outlets to limit information about nuclear aspects of the attacks. When reports of widespread suffering from radiation began to emerge from international journalists and Japanese officials, the American government downplayed it all as propaganda. One general even told Congress that dying from radiation was, in fact, “a very pleasant way to die.”

It was time, Hersey and Shawn decided, to find out the truth."

 Hersey lived in China until he was ten (The Call is his novel about a missionary family in China) and I suspect that helped him see the world from a different perspective than most other American journalists of his time.  

Today our president stymies journalism by lies, by walking out when the questions are too exacting, through misinformation, and just by creating so many incidents that the press has trouble sorting the important from the unimportant.  

The key story, I'm my mind is the Senate.  Reporters should be holding Republican Senators accountable for their abdication of their responsibility to hold the president accountable.  They should be as much of the news as the president is.