Australian war reporter Wilfred Burchett was the first Western journalist on the scene in Hiroshima and wrote a headline story about the devastation and “the atomic plague.”
As Burchett was finishing his story, a group of journalists arrived on an Air Force plane, with a censor in tow. Included were the celebrated Bill Lawrence of the New York Times and Homer Bigart of the New York Herald-Tribune. Burchett told them to forget about the rubble, “the story is in the hospitals.”
They were not happy to find Burchett already there and with a finished article. He asked them to carry the story back to Tokyo and transmit it to his paper. They refused. Burchett managed to transmit his story to a colleague in Tokyo, who sneaked it past the censors, and it ran on September 5 on the front page of the London Daily Express, under the headline the atomic plague.
Articles written by the American reporters who had landed in Hiroshima gave no evidence that they had visited the hospitals. Yet Lawrence, years later in his memoirs, revealed, “We talked with dying Japanese in the hospitals.” Were those stories censored by MacArthur’s people? Lawrence also disclosed that MacArthur was “hopping mad” about the press junket and cut off supplies of gasoline to planes that might make another journo trip possible. Then he ordered all American reporters out of Tokyo to a closely watched enclave in Yokohama.
Meanwhile, the first American reporter to reach Nagasaki, George Weller, had found a similar “plague” in that city, but made the mistake of filing his stories directly through MacArthur’s office. All of the pieces would be spiked, only appearing for the first time in 2005.
But the story doesn’t end there.
via 67 Years Ago: Burchett Leaves for Hiroshima—as New Era of Nuclear Censorship Begins | The Nation.
Truth and Traditions 
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