be suspicious of your sources

I don’t recall having heard this before: 

[A] month or so after atom bombs annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New York Times discounted the rumors that were terrifying the world.  

On September 12, 1945, the daily published a front-page story by its chief science reporter William L. Laurence, which challenged the alarmist notions head-on. There was no radioactivity whatsoever in those razed cities, the article assured one and all, it’s only ‘the Japanese continuing their propaganda …'   

That scoop won Laurence the Pulitzer Prize. 

Sometime later it came out that he was receiving two monthly paychecks: one from the New York Times, the other from the payroll of the US War Department.

The Wikipedia entry for William L. Laurence doesn’t tell the story quite that way. “For his 1945 coverage of the atomic bomb, beginning with [an] eyewitness account from Nagasaki, he won [the] Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1946.” 

Wikipedia goes on:

In 2004, journalists Amy Goodman and David Goodman called for the Pulitzer Board to strip Laurence and his paper, The New York Times, of his 1946 Pulitzer Prize. The journalists argued that at the time Laurence ‘was also on the payroll of War Department’ and that, after the atomic bombings, he ‘had a front-page story in the Times disputing the notion that radiation sickness was killing people.' They concluded that ‘his faithful parroting of the government line was crucial in launching a half-century of silence about the deadly lingering effects of the bomb.'

source:

Children of the Days: a calendar of human history

by Eduardo Galeano

translated by Mark Fried

Nation Books / Perseus Group, New York