Guardian piece on the legendary journalist Seymour Hersh, 76, holding forth to young English journalism students.
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would” – or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,” he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.
Hersh is writing a book about national security and has devoted a chapter to the bin Laden killing. He says a recent report put out by an “independent” Pakistani commission about life in the Abottabad compound in which Bin Laden was holed up would not stand up to scrutiny. “The Pakistanis put out a report, don’t get me going on it. Let’s put it this way, it was done with considerable American input. It’s a bullshit report,” he says hinting of revelations to come in his book.
Other great stuff:
“But I don’t know if it’s going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters ‘al-Qaida, al-Qaida’ and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic,” he says…
If Hersh was in charge of US Media Inc, his scorched earth policy wouldn’t stop with newspapers.
“I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let’s start all over, tabula rasa. The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he says….
“The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.” And he implores journalists to do something about it.
(One comment. The guy’s an investigative journalist. I remember when Hersh fired me with a passion for investigative journalism, back in 1975; he visited my college newspaper and when I asked him what to investigate said that Harvard had likely cooked its admissions standards to exclude radical troublemakers. I couldn’t confirm this. I lacked the chops. At that time, Nick Lemann said “to be an investigative journalist, you have to have a low threshhold for outrage.” Wonderful insight.)
“The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won’t like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing,” he says….”
Russell Brand on Morning Joe. He resorted to gross sexism but he got a great point across about the complete vapidity and vacuousness of US major network news analysis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2eDj39q0Fo
And Mika Brzezniski says nothing when Joe Klein says it’s better having 4 year olds dying over there
http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/10/23/morning-joes-drone-debate-whose-four-year-old-girls-should-be-killed/
Once there were giants.
It takes a reminder such as this that it can seem maddening to be sane in an insane world.
He makes it sound as if you’d almost have to be unstable.
Outrage in of itself isn’t the sign of an investigative journalist. Outrage doesn’t necessarily need to be moral in nature. And investigative journalism is, at its heart, a moral undertaking. To repair the ills of the world.
I’m not surprised that Lemann got it wrong, though. Maybe this is why Lemann tried to climb the greasy ladder during his career instead of actually investigating the powerful.
When I think investigative journalist, I think Glenn Greenwald.
Intellectual, but fearless and moral.
I can’t imagine starting out a journo career today. The motivations, influences, and mentoring must be so vastly different than when Hersh or you/PW did. As you ask, who or what is going to light enough of a fire in new journos bellies (collectively or individually) to spend years developing personal contacts and deep subject matter insight?
Greenwald and Taibbi? Is that it? Is that enough?
What are we going to do when the Viet Nam/Nixon era aggressiveness is completely gone?
What do they teach in journalism classes in college these day? Aren’t most professors lefties?
BTW, bin Laden death had been declared about a dozen times in prior years before Obama so declared it: http://www.activistpost.com/2011/05/big-lie-101-bin-laden-assassination.html