Real world news embargos because of panic fears?

Factual Questions
1

I’m watching the Svengoolie episode The Tarantula on Me TV and, of course, the Dashing Science Hero has just asked the Intrepid Reporter to not report on the Massive Problem because it would simply cause needless panic among the populace.

Pure genre.

There is no evidence any of this information is officially classified. Nobody’s been muzzled by top brass, that’s another (frankly, more entertaining) movie. There’s just a request that the people’s right to know be quashed because of fears of panic. Do we have any evidence of this actually happening in real life?

Once again, I know about national security secrecy and people requesting news embargoes for other reasons, and that isn’t what I want this thread to be about.

2

Quite a good question.

I have to think that if some absolutely incontrovertable proof that even the christian versions of birthers would accept that Jesus was married, had kids and worked as a laborer would throw a fair number of people into a tizzy. Or perhaps incontrovertable proof that there was no actual religious Jesus, just some guy who got dragged into being used as a figurehead for some little cult [like a Tammy Fae Baker or something] and then executed with the body being stolen to provide ‘proof’ that he was holy.

I think that right now if the government confessed that they did find a UFO at Roswell most people would accept it and go on with life. A few rabid UFO nuts would make a ruckus but the general population would be pretty meh about the whole thing. Most people, unless they will get something out of an issue directly [either good or bad] tend to be pretty neutral about something.

3

I agree with this, and you mentioned a specific thing I was half thinking of when I wrote the OP: The newspapers were reporting on the craft found at Roswell fairly soon (between one and three weeks) after the thing was found. A front page from a local paper (Roswell Daily Record, July 8, 1947; the one that mentions the USAAF) is always part of the Roswell narrative; had it been a movie, there would have been no reporting because preventing panic is a Patriotic Duty.

4

I’m thinking about the killing of Martin Luther King, and the Rodney King verdict, reporting of which would have been expected to cause widespread unrest at the time - and did - and in neither case was there an effective attempt to cover things up.

It strikes me that a cover-up in the case of panic would be the kind of thing the authorities would only undertake if they were absolutely certain of keeping a tight lid on it for decades, without the possibility of an early and credible leak. E.g. some mishap at NORAD, or a mistake with a B-52’s nuclear payload during peacetime, or an incident with a reactor on board a US aircraft carrier whilst in a friendly port. Something like that. The details would come out thirty years later, by which time no-one would care.

For any case where the authorities could not guarantee absolute secrecy I surmise that the consequences of a failed cover-up would actually make things worse. I remember NASA came in for a lot of stick after the Challenger disaster because it took them several hours to formally acknowledge that the orbiter had been destroyed and the crew killed even thought it was obvious from the television footage that something had gone badly wrong. That wasn’t a deliberate attempt to cover things up or indeed a cover-up at all, it was institutional inertia, but it made the organisation seem even more inept than otherwise.

Mind you, as a mental exercise, suppose the Rodney King trial had been held behind closed doors, and the verdict had been given out only to those present? I assume this would have been impossible under US law at the time; I’m not American, and I’m not a lawyer. The riots might not have happened if news of the verdict had been confused, obfuscated with legal mumbo-jumbo, and delivered a week later. And e.g. the French tried to cover up the killing of a Greenpeace activist when their secret service men sunk the Rainbow Warrior - which failed, but again the outrage was diluted and the incident is mostly forgotten nowadays. There were no mobs throwing bottles at French embassies, for example, because the outrage was diluted. Dilution rather than a solid wall of silence seems to be the key.

Here’s a real-world example, in which then-PM Winston Churchill ordered the cover-up of UFO sightings in the UK in order to avoid unrest:

*Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill’s] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

“The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people’s religious views.” *

Outside the context of UFO sightings, in the real world of riots and racist murder and religious strife etc, there are persistent allegations that the authorities and the media were unwilling to investigate and report on the Rochdale sex trafficking ring for reasons that are obvious from the Wikipedia article. Apart from that, I suspect the authorities have concluded that most people are apathetic, impotent, and ineffectual. What could cause a mass panic that would threaten the government of the UK or the US, that would not blow away with a few cold nights; or that the government’s security forces could not deal with? Who, after all, speaks today of the Occupy movement?

5

Obviously in wartime certain things are kept on the down low. A lot of it probably isn’t in the spirit of the OP (e.g. not reporting on defeats), but there are also things like not reporting about the Spanish Flu pandemic.
(the whole reason it’s called Spanish Flu, was because Spain was the first first-world nation that experienced an outbreak and didn’t have a news blackout on the subject).

6

The Japanese balloons bombs in WWII were kept under wraps by the US media at the request of the government.

7

During the Cuban Missile Crisis John Scali, a reporter for ABC, was actively working as a back channel conduitbetween the Soviets and the U.S. Nobody* officially* gagged Scali (i.e., no court order or detention or anything like that) but he obviously didn’t report everything he knew.

8

It’s not exactly what you’re asking for, but there’s a tacit agreement amongst Australian media outlets to limit reporting about suicides in order to avoid encouraging copycats. cite. It’s not always followed, especially with celebrities.

9

I know of a real-world example.

I had a friend who was a reporter. He happened to uncover some small scandal in the police department. The department had already discovered and taken steps to correct the problem, so that it had been fixed. They asked him not to report it, since it had been dealt with and had only been embarrassing to the people involved.

Now, in this case, my friend was an idiot. He printed the article anyway, and was soon fired. If he had any sense at all, he should have said, “OK, I won’t print it, but you owe me big time.” His bosses had already reprimanded him for doing that sort of thing in the past: refusing to sit on a story when asked (the editors didn’t learn about the request until after the article was published).

So in this case, not only was the offer made, but the reporter was expected to honor the request and drop the story, and was fired for not keeping it quiet.

10

Damage and casualty figures for the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake were under-reported deliberately. This wasn’t to avoid immediate panic, but to avoid medium-term pessimism: rebuilding San Francisco was an important priority, both for the city itself and the nation as a whole.

11

Newspapers aren’t public servants. They are 99.9% devices to put advertising in front of the public. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that everything newspapers have ever done has the effect of creating a pleasanter world for their major advertisers. That means that a million stories have been quashed or played down.

It’s almost the same for governmental problems. Stories that favor the party the publisher likes are played up; stories that don’t are played down.

IMO, neither of these have much to do with the OP. Very few things in the real world can cause true panics, so few newspapers ever have the opportunity to hide that kind of news.

The best examples I know of come from The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry. The 1918-1919 flu was one of the deadliest epidemics in history. Barry produces convincing evidence that it in many localities iy was as bad or worse as the Black Death in medieval Europe. It seemed to have started in the U.S. and was spread by troops being sent to camps before going off to the war in Europe. In several cities the epidemic escaped the training camps and spread throughout the population.

Barry shows that again and again city leaders refused to acknowledge the possibility of an epidemic before it started and in many cases ordered newspapers not to print the facts after it had taken hold. Only after entire cities became ghost towns - he cites a story from Philadelphia about someone who drove from downtown to a suburb ten miles out without seeing another car on the road - did people finally get a partial story. It’s not clear what he would have had them do. The only way to avoid the flu was complete isolation from anyone else and that would have lead to mass panic and/or mass starvation. Alternatives might have been worse, but the reality is that people died because the news was suppressed.

Almost nothing else like this has happened since that I can think of, though.

12

Relatives of the deceased crew of the USS Arizona were admonished not to reveal what ship they had served on.

13

This wasn’t anything to do with panic, but wartime secrecy, which I mentioned more-or-less explicitly in the OP (‘national security’).

Good examples from the rest of you. The Spanish Flu and the balloon bombs are likely the best examples, assuming the government didn’t declare the balloon bombs to be classified or some such.