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.
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
skeptical 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."
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.