I did a quick search on this particular subject and didn't find anything. If I missed it somehow, I apologize for posting this.
Don't know about anyone else, but I had always thought the current state of affairs at the NYT was a relatively current phenomenon. James Wolcott points us to a particularly egregious chapter in the "Liberal Paper of Record" here.
Read the Common Dreams column. Essentially a NYT columnist won a Pulitzer for some of the most egregious propaganda ever published in a newspaper.
Incredibly, the US military tried to deny the existence of radiation sickness, they also tried to downplay the level of casualties:
U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett's revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.
The reporter perpetrating this atrocity won a Pulitzer.
Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: "The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described 'symptoms' that did not ring true."
But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.
William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
Now I can't say that we shouldn't have done this, I don't think it's a stretch to say an invasion of Japan would have caused death and destruction on at least the same magnitude. But I don't think this is an excuse to withhold the truth of what actually happened.