MediaWatch: August 1995

Janet Cooke Award: Professor Jenning's Fractured Fairy Tale

ABC Special Contends U.S. Dropped the Bomb Unnecessarily to Stoke the Cold War

The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum is currently exhibiting a newly refurbished Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima 50 years ago. But the museum's curators originally planned a confessional exhibit, displaying America's guilt and Japan's innocence in World War II. One museum passage would have read that for Americans, fighting Japan was "a war of vengeance. For most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism."

That canceled leftist exhibit in a tax-funded museum became the center of ABC's July 27 Peter Jennings Reporting 90-minute special, "Hiroshima: Why the Bomb Was Dropped." ABC told viewers U.S. officials overstated the casualty estimates of an invasion of Japan; that the Allied demand for the dumping of the Japanese emperor delayed an imminent surrender; and that the U.S. dropped the bomb not to save lives, but to play a cynical Cold War game of intimidating the Soviets. For presenting a one-sided version of revisionist history much like the rejected exhibit, ABC earned the August Janet Cooke Award.

Jennings began by mourning the original Smithsonian vision, implying that the facts were no match for the politicians: "Many veterans insisted that by dropping the bomb, the U.S. avoided a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland. One million lives, they argued, had been saved. But when the Smithsonian responded that such a claim had no historical basis, the vets went to Capitol Hill. Eighty-one Congressmen took up their cause....the Smithsonian bent to pressure....There would be nothing on the decision to drop the bomb and there would be no pictures of the victims."

Jennings later repeated his claim of nonexistent estimates: "The most single enduring fiction...was the notion most of us have long believed, that one million American lives were saved by the bomb. There is no documentary evidence as to where the number came from." Jennings didn't deal with the questions: Since there was no invasion, how can there be an accurate estimate? And if the bomb only saved 200,000 U.S. lives, would that have been unimportant?

One expert ABC interviewed, Robert Maddox, a historian from Penn State University and author of the forthcoming Weapons for Victory, told MediaWatch: "They were flat wrong on that. I provided [ABC] with my manuscript on that. The figure did not come out of thin air, but from the Joint Chiefs of Staff on August 30, 1944, which told the President there could be 500,000 deaths and many more wounded. Herbert Hoover met with Truman, and in a later memorandum, Hoover suggested 500,000 to 1 million casualties. ABC said in a press release the morning of the show that the number `came out of thin air.' I called [producer] Elizabeth Sams and said `He's going to embarrass himself tonight.' But she said the show was already in the can, or something like that."

Maddox added: "The worst atrocity in the show is that they just jump over the bitter struggle in the Japanese government between August 7 and 15, because that would undermine the rest of the program. They pretend that retention of the emperor was the sole obstacle to peace, but hardliners still refused to give in after both atomic bombs and the Russians' entry into the war. So why would they surrender after a ground invasion? "

Jennings claimed that two days after Hiroshima, "In Tokyo, the shock that Russia had entered the war forced military hardliners to begin talking surrender. They were still arguing on the morning of August the 9th. At 11:02 A.M., the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. There might have been a moment when the bombing of Nagasaki could have been stopped or at least delayed. But no second order from the President was needed to drop the second bomb." ABC spent almost no time on Japanese atrocities (unlike CBS Reports a week later) and no time on how a Soviet invasion of Japan could have left them occupied like Eastern Europe.

Maddox was outnumbered by 10 revisionist historians including Barton Bernstein, who claimed invading Japan would have cost fewer than 50,000 casualties, despite estimated troop strength of almost 900,000 on the island of Kyushu alone, and Gar Alperovitz, who once claimed the bomb was "totally unnecessary." The revisionists spouted 39 soundbites to two non-dissenting informational quotes from Maddox. Other non-revisionist historians with new books, including Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen, writers of Code-Name Downfall, or Robert P. Newman, author of Truman and the Hiroshima Cult, were not included. Maddox told MediaWatch: "You didn't get the sense there was a defense [of the decision to drop the bomb] from legitimate scholars."

Senior Producer Martin Smith, failed to return repeated phone calls, but told The Washington Times: "I reject the notion that we used a small circle of historians. We talked with most of the leading historians of the field." Smith, a former Frontline producer, worked on two PBS documentaries on the October Surprise conspiracy, which was dismissed by Democrat-led House and Senate investigations.

But Smith was one of a cast of long-time liberal producers working on the special. David Gelber served as Executive Producer, but is best known as the 60 Minutes producer behind the hoax that tagged Alar as "the most potent cancer-causing agent in the food supply." Producers Sherry Jones and Elizabeth Sams are PBS Frontline contributors as well. Jones co-wrote the Hiroshima special with Jennings, and also wrote the January Frontline on "What Happened to Bill Clinton?" (Her answer: Clinton failed to be liberal enough).

The Jennings special was produced by Jones' firm, Washington Media Associates, which also contracts with Frontline. An end credit read: "A Production of Washington Media Associates for ABC News." "They certainly did work for us, but we had complete editorial control," ABC spokesman Eileen Murphy told MediaWatch. "We never take an hour and let them put their thing on the air."

Jennings ended the show with a gripe: "It's unfortunate, we think, that some veterans' organizations and some politicians felt the need to bully our most important national museum, so the whole story of Hiroshima is not represented here. That is not fair to history or to the rest of us. After all, freedom of discussion was one of the ideals that Americans fought and died for." ABC failed to air a free discussion.

Instead, Jennings employed the classic left-wing dictum that whenever the left loses a fight over publicly funded propaganda, free speech has been squelched. Jennings apparently did not think it was a violation of free speech to take millions of dollars from Americans who fought in World War II in order to denigrate them as pawns in an evil Western imperialist war machine that victimized the Japanese.

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