The First Attack Ads: Hollywood vs. Upton Sinclair aired over hundreds of PBS stations in October 2022 and The Memorial Day Massacre did the same in 2023.
His latest book, published by the New Press in 2020, was the award-winning The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood — and America — Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
His previous book, a bestseller, was published by Crown in October 2016 (and in ten editions abroad), was The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill.
[citation needed] Mitchell was editor of Nuclear Times magazine (1982 to 1986), and became interested in the history of the United States' use of the atom bomb during World War II.
With fellow editor Peter Knobler, Mitchell is credited with helping to create in December 1972 and publish the first magazine article about the now-prominent musician Bruce Springsteen.
He has written numerous articles about the atomic bombings during World War II, published in magazines and newspapers including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
His book on how the U.S. suppressed shocking footage shot by American military film crews in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Atomic Cover-Up, was published in 2011.
In an interview, he discussed the long-censored stories of the Chicago Tribune correspondent George Weller, the first Western news reporter to reach Nagasaki after the atomic bombing.
PBS adapted it as "We Have a Plan", the fourth of seven documentary episodes featured in The Great Depression (1993) series, produced and directed by Lyn Goldfarb.
These are So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed in Iraq (2008)—re-published as an e-book in 2013, Bradley Manning: Truth and Consequences (2011, coauthor with Kevin Gosztola), and The Age of WikiLeaks (2011).
In an E&P column in 2003, Mitchell wrote about having made up some quotes in a man-in-the-street article at age 21, while working as a summer intern (what he described as his Jayson Blair moment).
[citation needed] In a 2004 interview with the Echo Chamber Project, Mitchell discussed the duty of news reporters to be "skeptical.
"[9] He cited coverage of the Bush administration's justification of the 2003 War in Iraq as a failure of the media to exercise skepticism.