breakingtheset
Published on Sep 30, 2013
Abby Martin gives props to world renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, for calling out the abysmal failure of the corporate media in the US, saying that the MSM should fire 90 percent of its reporters and that "not one word" of the bin laden death narrative is true.
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Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media
Pulitzer
Prize winner explains how to fix journalism, saying press should 'fire
90% of editors and promote ones you can't control'
Seymour Hersh exposed
the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, for which he won the
Pulitzer Prize. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis
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."
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