The DJ may well have had bad intentions but not necessarily so. The word dark is the writer's choice, to show that the result of the DJ spinning the story about the coffins was responsible for people not taking the life-saving vaccinations. Still, I do agree with tedmc that there's a suggestion that the DJ was deliberately lying.
... radio personality Walter Winchell—the shock jock of his age—who spread the dark lie that warehouses around the country were stockpiling little white coffins to hold the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of children who would surely be claimed by Salk’s infernal potion.
It's my strong belief that Walter Winchell was deliberately lying (irresponsibly spreading misinformation in the form of a
dark lie) while reporting about the development of Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine.
Walter Winchell was a syndicated American newspaper gossip columnist and radio news commentator circa 1930 - 1969. He was not a DJ.
Winchell was known for trading gossip, sometimes in return for his silence. His outspoken style made him both feared and admired.
In his radio and television broadcasts on April 4, 1954, Winchell helped to stoke public fear of the polio vaccine. Winchell said, "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America ... and all the ships at sea. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine claimed to be a polio cure. It may be a killer." Winchell claimed that the U.S. Public Health Services found live polio viruses in seven of ten vaccine batches it tested, reporting, "It killed several monkeys ... the United States Public Health Service will confirm this in about 10 days." Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, immediately responded that the vaccine, which had been recently tested on 7,500 school children at the University of Pittsburgh, had been triple tested for the absence of live virus by its manufacturers, the National Institutes of Health, and in his own research lab, and that similar testing would continue to screen out future batches containing live virus. Wikipedia
Winchell never checked his facts once while Salk did three trials on the vaccine and mass inoculations were successful. Winchell's story that warehouses around the country were stockpiling little white coffins to hold the bodies of the hundreds of thousands of children who would surely be claimed by Salk’s infernal potion were also deliberate lies.
After these false stories were revealed, Winchell’s credibility and reputation went down the tubes while Salk was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.
Sadly, some people believed the lies by Winchell and suffered the consequences and died.
