Pulitzer Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire 90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh,
the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".
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.
The Obama administration lies systematically, he claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.
"It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]," he declares in an interview with the Guardian.
"It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.
He isn't even sure if the recent revelations about the depth and breadth of surveillance by the National Security Agency will have a lasting effect.
Snowden changed the debate on surveillance
He is certain that NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden "changed the whole nature of the debate" about surveillance. Hersh says he and other journalists had written about surveillance, but Snowden was significant because he provided documentary evidence – although he is sceptical about whether the revelations will change the US government's policy.
"Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate, it's real now," Hersh says.
"Editors love documents. Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that, they love documents, so he changed the whole ball game," he adds, before qualifying his remarks.
"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.
Holding court to a packed audience at City University in London's summer school on
investigative journalism, 76-year-old Hersh is on full throttle, a whirlwind of amazing stories of how journalism used to be; how he exposed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, how he got the Abu Ghraib pictures of American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks of Edward Snowden.
Hope of redemption
Despite his concern about the timidity of journalism he believes the trade still offers hope of redemption.
"I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it's not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity."
His story of how he uncovered the My Lai atrocity is one of old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and doggedness. Back in 1969, he got a tip about a 26-year-old platoon leader, William Calley, who had been charged by the army with alleged mass murder.
Instead of picking up the phone to a press officer, he got into his car and started looking for him in the army camp of Fort Benning in Georgia, where he heard he had been detained. From door to door he searched the vast compound, sometimes blagging his way, marching up to the reception, slamming his fist on the table and shouting: "Sergeant, I want Calley out now."
Eventually his efforts paid off
with his first story appearing in the St Louis Post-Despatch, which was then syndicated across America and eventually earned him the
Pulitzer Prize. "I did five stories. I charged $100 for the first, by the end the [New York] Times were paying $5,000."
He was hired by the New York Times to follow up the Watergate scandal and ended up hounding Nixon over Cambodia. Almost 30 years later, Hersh made global headlines all over again with his exposure of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Put in the hours
For students of journalism his message is put the miles and the hours in. He knew about Abu Ghraib five months before he could write about it, having been tipped off by a senior Iraqi army officer who risked his own life by coming out of Baghdad to Damascus to tell him how prisoners had been writing to their families asking them to come and kill them because they had been "despoiled".
"I went five months looking for a document, because without a document, there's nothing there, it doesn't go anywhere."
Hersh returns to US president
Barack Obama. He has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.
"Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for. What's going on [with journalists]?" he asks.
He says investigative journalism in the US is being killed by the crisis of confidence, lack of resources and a misguided notion of what the job entails.
"Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize," he adds. "It's a packaged journalism, so you pick a target like – I don't mean to diminish because anyone who does it works hard – but are railway crossings safe and stuff like that, that's a serious issue but there are other issues too.
"Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is? Why do
newspapers constantly cite the two or three groups that monitor drone killings. Why don't we do our own work?
"Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardises, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."
He says in some ways President
George Bush's administration was easier to write about. "The Bush era, I felt it was much easier to be critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in the Obama era," he said.
Asked what the solution is Hersh warms to his theme that most editors are pusillanimous and should be fired.
"I'll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can't control," he says. I saw it in the New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don't get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say 'I don't care what you say'.
Nor does he understand why the Washington Post held back on the Snowden files until it learned the Guardian was about to publish.
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.
Hersh is currently on a break from reporting, working on a book which undoubtedly will make for uncomfortable reading for both Bush and Obama.
"The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple." And he implores journalists to do something about it.
===
Seymour Hersh's new book to detail "how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government."
By Stephen C. WebsterFriday, January 21st, 2011
Veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has broken some massive stories in his day, but uncovering secret societies within the highest echelons of America's military would probably be the biggest of his career.
Well, get ready for the media storm: That's essentially what Hersh told an audience in Doha, Qatar recently, according to
a report published earlier this week by
Foreign Policy.
Speaking at a campus operated by Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, Hersh said he was working on a new book that details how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government.
It's not only that the neocons took it over but how easily they did it -- how Congress disappeared, how the press became part of it, how the public acquiesced," he continued, according to the published quotes.
Hersh also lamented President Obama's continuance of the Bush administration's worst abuses.
"Just when we needed an angry black man, we didn't get one," he reportedly said.
The
Foreign Policy report added that in 2003, those "in the Cheney shop" were not concerned about the havoc the invasion of Iraq was destined to cause.
"[The] attitude was, 'What's this? What are they all worried about, the politicians and the press, they're all worried about some looting?" Hersh was quoted as saying. "Don't they get it? We're gonna change moseques into cathedrals. And when we get all the oil, nobody's gonna give a damn.' That's the attitude. We're gonna chance mosques into cathedrals. That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command [JSOC]."
He further claimed that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Vice Admiral William McRaven and others in the JSOC were members of the "Knights of Malta" and "Opus Dei," two little known Catholic orders.
"They do see what they're doing -- and this is not an atypical attitude among some military -- it's a crusade, literally," Hersh reportedly continued. "They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function."
He added that members of these societies have developed a secret set of insignias that represent "the whole notion that this is a culture war" between religions.
It was President George W. Bush who first
invoked images of a holy war in the Middle East, when he suggested soon after Sept. 11, 2001 that the US was on a "crusade" in the region.
The "
Knights of Malta" were a Catholic order founded in 1085 as a group of monks who cared for the wounded. It evolved into a military order that safeguarded Christian pilgrims from Muslims during the nine "Crusades," where Europe's Christian states
laid siege to Muslims for control of Jerusalem.
"Opus Dei," popularly depicted in the Hollywood film "
The DaVinci Code," was founded in 1928 and officially accepted as part of the Catholic church in 1947.
The group's website claimed their principle calling was to bring about a "Christian renewal" around the world.
Doubts, denials and a distinctive trendRaw Story reached out to Hersh and
The New Yorker to confirm the accuracy of his quotes, placing this report on hold until they responded. Both declined to make any further statement, neither confirming nor denying the quotes.
However, one source close to Hersh who spoke to Raw Story off the record, suggested that
Foreign Policy's report was indeed correct.
Raw Story followed-up on the quotes due to a widely-reported
false claim attributed to Hersh in May 2009, where he'd allegedly said former Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
The report, which appeared to have originated in Pakistan, was picked up by
The Wall Street Journal and the conservative-leaning
American Spectator, but both removed the links after Raw Story published a denial from Hersh. A link to Raw Story's original report was unavailable due to a database malfunction.
Hersh, a Pulitzer-winning author and reporter, has previously reported that the JSOC was set up by former Vice President Cheney as something of an "executive assassination squad" that operated outside of congressional authority.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who resigned after
Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings
quoted him mocking the US civilian command, led JSOC before taking command of America's war effort in Afghanistan.
In an email to the military's
Stars and Stripes publication, McChrystal's spokesman, David Bolger,
panned Hersh's claim.
“The allegations recently made by Seymour Hersh relating to General McChrystal’s involvement with an organization called The Knights of Malta are completely false and without basis in fact,” he reportedly wrote. “General McChrystal is not and has never been a member of that organization.”
The religious indoctrination of US soldiers has been in headlines in recent weeks as soldiers who "failed" the "spiritual fitness" portion of the "comprehensive soldier fitness" test claimed they were forced to attend Christian ceremonies and become "born again" by professing love for the Christian deity.
Similarly,
GQ magazine uncovered last year a series of top-secret military briefings prepared by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that
included passages from the Bible.
Trijicon Inc., a defense contractor, was also discovered last Janurary to have been for years placing scriptural references on gun sights used by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Their actions revealed, Trijicon was forced to
provide the Pentagon with kits to remove the codes.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/highranking-members-military-part-kni...NEW YORK, September 29, 2013 — Forget about whether Al Qaeda is actually on the run—Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author
Seymour (“Sy”) Hersh does not even believe that American Forces killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011.
According to Hersh, “not one thing is true” about the White House narrative concerning Osama bin Laden and his fateful end. Think how many people are at grave risk if Hersh actually proves his allegations.
Reaching well beyond the specifics concerning what happened at Abbottabad in Pakistan, Hersh also sucker-punches the self-reinforcing filter that the American media uses to display President Obama to the public.
Count on whispers that Hersh, at 76, may now actually be a bit daft. However, even President Obama’s media wranglers will have trouble arguing Sy Hersh is leader, in secret, of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Would President Obama and his team manufacture a false narrative and sell it to the entire world starting on May 2, 2011?
Some Reasons the Administration Should Truly be Worried
Even Senator Diane Feinstein will concede that Sy Hersh has a valid “license” to investigate and then share his findings.
Looking at the body of his work, one finds that he is a thorough man who skillfully navigated his way through numerous controversies, ceaselessly uncovering solid evidence that shapes his assertions.
Reading published accounts of his recent remarks, we learn that Hersh has long been at work on a book and that the raid allegations may only occupy one chapter. Think of the kind of evidence Hersh must already have.
For example, numerous Obama Administration members and confidantes use email—some likely have personal accounts while others may also have alias accounts. Would Hersh reach out to Edward Snowden, to Julian Assange, or perhaps to disgruntled individuals with access to helpful documents? In the simple words of one steadfast Obama critic: “you betcha”.
Before making his stunning claims, would Hersh prepare his ground? One imagines he is aware of ways in which the Obama Administration and allies disparage and harass “enemies”. One also expects that Hersh and others rising to challenge the Obama Administration have much more to reveal.
What Actually Happened in Abbottabad, Pakistan? President Obama and his team are not the only ones with serious problems. On August 8, 2011,
The New Yorker published an extensive piece entitled
“Getting Bin Laden: What happened that night in Abbottabad”, written by Nicholas Schmidle.
In crisp and vivid terms, Schmidle describes planning, execution and aftermath of the mission, lacing his account with numerous quotes and insights from various Obama Administration officials and military personnel.
Back in 2011,
others quickly questioned Schmidle’s reporting.
Now the editor of
The New Yorker, David Remnick cannot have it both ways. Either Hersh or Schmidle are bonkers—and the public absolutely has a right to know where reality bites.
Related Issues Posed by a 60 Minutes Episode in 2012 Other media organizations appear to join the Administration in having massive credibility issues, thanks to Hersh’s outbursts.
On September 9, 2012, just 3 days following conclusion of the Democrat National Convention, an unidentified Seal Team member described on 60 Minutes what he says happened on May 2, 2011 in thrilling detail. For Hersh to be correct, this entire story would have to be “inoperative”.
Ordinary mortals learn that getting the 60 Minutes team to concentrate upon a story is no easy matter—senior executives and journalists at CBS generally do their homework carefully.
Given Hersh’s claims and In view of the fact that Ben Rhodes worked directly for President Obama while his brother served as President of CBS News, a responsible chief executive officer at CBS must swiftly conduct a thorough and credible investigation.
We shall see whether Les Moonves rises to the challenge.
Getting Back to Benghazi Re-evaluating the Obama Administration’s record inevitably takes one to Libya. The trouble that erupted in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 did not start that day or in that place.
As awful as the tragedy became, Benghazi was likely just one stop along a disturbing trail where powerful Americans inside the Obama Administration mounted clandestine efforts that do not serve the national interest.
Well before the 2012 Democrat Convention, Mohamed Morsi was acting as President of Egypt in ways that the Obama Administration cannot have welcomed.
On June 29, 2012, Morsi again demanded that we
release Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” in a move highly unlikely to convince American voters that substituting Morsi for Hosni Mubarak was inspired statecraft.
Thereafter, President Morsi stoked tensions inside Egypt that finally erupted on September 11, 2012, 3 days following airing on local television of a movie trailer that offended Muslims around the world.
To date, no renowned reporter with mainstream credentials has succeeded in pulling pieces along the trail of deceit where America, surprisingly, found ourselves arming and financing the Muslim Brotherhood.
John Batchelor on WABC radio, multiple reporters at Fox News, and Sharyl Attkinson at CBS are among those who have worked tirelessly to unravel the truth about what likely happened in Benghazi, in Egypt and in producing a false narrative concerning the Arab “Spring”.
If Sy Hersh does not buy the Abbottabad story, he certainly will not end up accepting the wider story line running through Benghazi.
Placing Phony Scandals in Appropriate Context Perhaps President Obama is right to characterize investigations into Benghazi, IRS abuses, and government surveillance inside the United States as “phony scandals”.
But if Sy Hersh is correct about the 2011 raid, the President and all those who helped sell this narrative pulled off crimes that make Watergate look like child’s play.
Forget Vladimir Putin’s humiliating ascent on world stage, forget America’s failure to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and forget all the dysfunction we watch now in Washington, DC. The President and a team that lulled the mainstream media and public to sleep are getting a tumultuous lesson in the power of the press.
President Obama’s string of luck is breaking bad—even he must finally know it.
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