PERIODICALS

chant-farmer Hardy Bell, and St. Louis to- former slaves, and viewing the formerly bacconist William Deaderick. dominant class with suspicion and skepti- The Civil War ruined many of the Deep cism," Schweninger writes, "they could South's prosperous blacks, just as it did more easily build on their past experiences many white plantation owners. The Upper during the postwar era to advance not only South's black elite prospered. "More self- their own cause but the cause of freedmen confident, able to mix more easily with as well."

PRESS & TELEVISION

The Atom Bomb "The Office of Censorship's Attempt to Control Press Coverage of the Atomic Bomb During World War 11" by Patrick S. And the Press Washbum, in Journalism Monographs (~pril1990), 1621 COL . lege St., Univ. of S.C., Columbia, S.C. 29208-0251. A month after the first atomic bomb fell on tarily) to avoid all mention even of the Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Gen. H. H. element uranium. Almost immediately. Arnold of the Army Air Force wrote a problems appeared. On Halloween D& glowing letter to the head of the U.S. Office for example, the Washington Post ran a of Censorship thanking him for suppress- lighthearted feature story which began: "A ing "any mention" of the new weapon in young fellow who has been studying much the press until it was used. Arnold wrote of his life on the matter of blowing up na- that it "shall go down in history as the best- tions with an atom would like to get a kept secret of any war." wage increase from the War Labor What is interesting, notes Washburn, a Board." In December, the Cleveland Press professor of journalism at Ohio University, published a vague story about the "Forbid- is not the fact that Arnold was wrong but den City" at Los Alamos, New Mexico. why he was wrong. Despite the patriotic In some cases, Washburn says, editors cooperation of newspaper, magazine, and simply were not aware of the guidelines; in radio editors, there were dozens of refer- others, they did not think that the rules ap- ences to atomic energy and weaponry in plied to their story. Other leaks slipped the press during World War 11. through because of carelessness, often the Until 1943, even the Office of Censor-- result of wartime labor shortages. On

ship was kept in the dark about atomic re- more than one occasion., public officials search. In June, it asked editors (volun- themselves were responsible for uninten- SUPERMAN

This 1945 "Superman" comic strip was the most bizarre breach of wartime secrecy. Censors complained, but it took seven more strips to extricate Superman from the atomic theme.

WQ SUMMER 1990 20 PERIODICALS

tional "busts" of the secrecy code. During cludes, the story of the atom bomb re- a Pentagon press briefing in 1944, Brig. mained "reasonably quiet." He believes Gen. Frederick H. Smith, Jr., told report- that much of the credit belongs to Byron ers that the Germans were probably work- Price, the ex-newsman who directed the ing on an "atomic explosive," and re- Office of Censorshin. Price resisted the marked that he was "not long-haired army's call to impose a total news black- enough to know exactly where we stand in out on atomic (and other) news, opting in- working on atomic explosive force, but I stead for a voluntary approach. Total cen- believe there are many technical difficul- sorship, he insisted, would have pushed ties to overcome." By the time Smith's the press into open revolt. The success of blunder was discovered, the story had al- his policies, Washburn concludes, proved ready gone out over the news wires. that government and a free press can co- Despite leaks like this, Washburn con- operate in times of grave national peril.

"The Media's One and Only Freedom Story" by Lawrence Missing the Weschler, in Columbia Journalism Review (March-April 1990), Freedom Beat 700 Journalism ~idg.,Columbia Univ., New York, N.Y. 10027, and "Eastern Europe: The Story the Media Missed" by Vladimir Tismaneanu in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1990), 6042 S. Kimbark, Chicago, 111. 60637.

"A remarkable upwelling of democratic money, explanations he dismisses. Latin spirit occurred simultaneously on two America deserves coverage not only on its continents. Can you name the second own merits, he argues, but because "the one?" sorts of economic dilemmas Eastern Euro- If you can't, writes Weschler, a staff re- peans seem likely to face in the decades porter for the New Yorker, it is because the ahead as they attempt the transition to a U.S. news media virtually ignored the re- wide-open free market. . . are precisely the emergence of democracy in Latin America sort that Latin Americans have been strug- last year. During a two-week period in De- gling with." cember 1989, Chile and Brazil held their And, apparently, editors and TV news first free presidential elections in 16 and producers deserve no congratulations for 25 years, respectively, but you might not their coverage of Eastern Europe, either. have known about these landmark events Tismaneanu, a resident scholar at Phila- if you relied on Dan Rather for your news. delphia's Foreign Policy Research Insti- He never mentioned the election in Brazil, tute, contends that they even got that story the world's sixth most populous nation, wrong. During the last four years, he ob- and he brieflv mentioned Chile once. in a serves. "Eastern Europe has been domi- reference that was dropped from the 'west nated by these two processes: the dramatic Coast edition of the CBS Evening News. loss of authority and credibility of the rul- Meanwhile, CBS managed to find time for ing elites. . . and the rise of a parallel civil three reports from Bulgaria. society in which patterns of conduct are This is only the most extreme case of ne- different from, and even opposed to, the glect that Weschler discovered in his sur- official sanctioned code of social success. vey of the nation's major news media. But The Western mass media reported the even the best performer, Time, did poorly: story incompletely. They observed and It had only 6.65 pages of Latin American even analyzed the rise of civil society with- coverage between November 6, 1989 and out naming it or identifying it as the single January 1, 1990, versus 98 pages devoted most important challenge to the commu- to Eastern Europe. nist status quo. It is one thing to report on The news executives Weschler inter- the trial of the Jazz Section in Prague and viewed pleaded lack of time, space, and another to present it as part of the authori- Periodicals continues on page 125