After doing so quick research on the media blackout of the flu I found this article. It's goes to show how hard they tried to bury it. This might be the first conspiracy theory in the media or at least on this kind of scale.


Paging through the Times, here are some of the stories a reader would have encountered before getting to the first article on the flu: John Barrymore won raves for his performance in Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse. Miss Katharine Every Morgan was married at her family’s Long Island country estate in Wheatley Hills. And in financial news, “The cotton market yesterday was dull and, to the bulls, disappointing.”

Only after trudging through the classifieds, on the final page of the paper, would a reader have arrived at a one-column headline, “Grip Now Sweeping Forty-Three States” and the subhead, “Drastic Steps Taken Throughout the Nation to Check on the Epidemic.”

Normally, if a headline includes words like “Drastic” and “Epidemic,” editors don’t hide the story on page 24.