Seymour Hersh verified: Honest Journalism is
Dead
2. In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Sunday,
Sept. 29, 2012
4. 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 brutalizing Iraqi prisoners, and what he thinks
of Edward Snowden.
5. Seymour Hersch 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.
6. He is angry about the timidity of journalists in
America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular
messenger of TRUTH.
7. Don't even get him started on the New York Times
which, he says, spends "so much time carrying water for Obama than ever I
thought they would" - ....
8. The Obama administration lies systematically, he
claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or bit
print titles, challenge him.
9."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.
10. "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 it doesn't happen any
more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to
re-elect him. ...
11. Despite his concern about the timidity of journalism
he believes the trade still offers hope of redemption. "I have 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.
12. 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.
13. "Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational
standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying attention to
Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are no doing 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.
14. 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.
15. "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 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 don't we do our own work?
16."Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not
just to says - here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out
who's right and who's wrong about issues... 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 and outsider ..."
17. "The Bush era, I felt was much easier to be critical
than it is {of} Obama. Much more difficult than in the Obama era," he said.
[FYI: Since 2009, 25 journalists have been hired by Obama.]
18. "THE REPUBLIC'S IN TROUBLE, WE LIE ABOUT EVERYTHING,
LYING HAS BECOME THE STAPLE." AND HE IMPLORES JOURNALIST TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT
IT.
GEORGE H.
KUBECK
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