There are two possible responses to the rise of conspiracy theories: either the media needs to re-educate the public, or the media needs to regain the public’s trust. Among respectable commentators, the first option is more popular. Barack Obama recently suggested that “we’re going to have to work with the media and with the tech companies to find ways to inform the public better about the issues, and to bolster the standards that ensure we can separate truth from fiction.”
But of course, the media, the tech companies and the rest of the political elite which Obama describes as “we” are not trusted in the first place. And looking at their recent record — Russiagate, the Cambridge Analytica non-story, the suppression of inconvenient reports about the Biden campaign — you can see why. So perhaps it’s better to start with the other question: how can the mainstream media regain the public’s trust?
The simple answer to that is that it needs more people like John Hersey, and more institutions like the New Yorker of 1946.
Hersey, a journalist and novelist who died in 1993, is the hero of Lesley Blume’s absorbing new book Fallout. As Blume shows, the US government did a remarkably efficient job of covering up the effects of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reporters were first banned, then allowed in on condition that they toed the line. At one point, the Pentagon invited reporters from outlets including the Associated Press, United Press, the New York Times, NBC, CBS and ABC to join a supervised trip to the two cities. The results were exemplified by a piece in the New York Times assuring readers that, “horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects … in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.”
There were a couple of more truthful journalists; one found that his report was lost in the post, while the other had his camera stolen and was kicked out of the country. Both spoke contemptuously of the “housetrained reporters” who were, in effect, relaying government propaganda. It’s the kind of thing which encourages conspiracy theories: a major atrocity, a huge historical event, concealed from the public — and not despite the media but with its help.
What eventually rescued the credibility of the press was Hersey’s New Yorker report from Hiroshima, which described, in 30,000 vivid and precise words, what had happened on the day the bomb fell. The horrifying facts Hersey had uncovered, and the novelistic skill with which he presented them, caused a sensation. The article reached hundreds of thousands of readers — among them Albert Einstein, who ordered a thousand copies for him to distribute to leading scientists, and President Truman, who publicly pretended he “never read” the New Yorker while launching a damage-limitation PR campaign.
Hersey himself was named as one of Celebrity Bulletin’s top 10 celebrities of 1946 alongside Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. After his article, celebrations of scientific progress, or of World War II as a great moral crusade, would never ring quite as true again. And it’s partly thanks to Hersey that the atom bomb has not been used since.
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