{"id":182876,"date":"2015-05-16T20:06:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-17T01:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/05\/16\/some-other-folks-feel-the-same-way-about-the-medias-response-as-i-do\/"},"modified":"2015-05-16T20:06:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-17T01:06:00","slug":"some-other-folks-feel-the-same-way-about-the-medias-response-as-i-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/05\/16\/some-other-folks-feel-the-same-way-about-the-medias-response-as-i-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Other Folks Feel the Same Way about the Media’s Response as I Do"},"content":{"rendered":"
There have been two cogent and well written critiques of the generally dismissive response of the mainstream media to Seymour Hersh’s story which claims to show that the official narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing was largely untrue.<\/div>\n

The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review<\/i> is likely to gain the most currency. It’s a fairly conventional analysis, and notes that Hersh’s critics have been lazy and knee jerk in their dismissal of his latest story<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative<\/a> of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger. <\/p>\n

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh\u2019s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims\u2014even though there\u2019s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled<\/a> the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public. <\/p>\n

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event\u2014but it\u2019s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear. <\/p>\n

Hersh\u2019s many critics, almost<\/a> word-for-word<\/a>, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements\u2014breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later\u2014before going on to call him every name in the book: \u201cconspiracy theorist,\u201d \u201coff the rails,\u201d \u201ccrank.\u201d Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh\u2019s piece in the last week, has amounted to \u201cThat doesn\u2019t make sense to me,\u201d or \u201cThat\u2019s not what government officials told me before,\u201d or \u201cHow are we to believe his anonymous sources?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times<\/i> Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh\u2019s critics put together. She wrote in the Times this week that she \u201cwould not necessarily dismiss [Hersh\u2019s] claims immediately\u201d and that \u201che is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of.\u201d Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA to bin Laden, Gall wrote that \u201cmy own reporting tracks with Hersh\u2019s.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Within months, of course, Hersh\u2019s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times<\/i>. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story \u201cexaggerated\u201d and \u201coverwritten and under-researched.\u201d A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Over at Pando<\/i>, the redoubtable Mark Ames focuses more tightly on the 1970s CIA spying revalations<\/a>, which to my mind makes for a more compelling critique of the recent press wank-fest, if just because the reaction seems identical to the last time:<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Hersh has pissed off some very powerful people and institutions with this story, and that means the inevitable media pushback to discredit his reporting is already underway, with the attacks on Hersh led by Vox Media\u2019s Max Fisher<\/a>, CNN\u2019s Peter Bergen<\/a>, and even some on the left like Nation Institute reporter<\/a> Matthieu Aikins<\/a>. Yesterday Slate joined the pile-on, running a wildly entertaining, hostile interview<\/a> with Hersh. <\/span>

<\/span>Such attacks by fellow journalists on a Sy Hersh bombshell are nothing new\u2014in fact, he used to relish them, and probably still does. He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 expos\u00e9 <\/a>of the CIA\u2019s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents. <\/span>

<\/span>Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib expos\u00e9s, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop<\/a>, which the New York Times called \u201cthe son of Watergate,\u201d that was his most consequential and controversial\u2014from this one sensational expos\u00e9 the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh\u2019s expos\u00e9s directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee<\/a> hearings in the House, which I wrote about<\/a> in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh\u2019s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, \u201cThe CIA\u2019s \u2018Illegal Domestic Spying,\u2019\u201d attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources\u2014this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhile almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of \u2018spying,\u2019 and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called \u2018domestic spying,\u2019 it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in \u2018violation\u2019 of the agency\u2019s congressional charter or are \u2018illegal.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>A common line of attack was to call Hersh\u2019s series \u201coverwritten and under-researched.\u201d Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo\u2019s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh\u2019s stories as \u201coverwritten and under-researched\u201d; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone\u2019s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn\u2019t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes \u201coverwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Hersh might\u2019ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby\u2019s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWilliam E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After the CIA chief\u2019s confirmation of Hersh\u2019s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted\u2019s book, after Colby\u2019s admission,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Washington Post reported that Colby\u2019s disclosure had \u2018confirmed major elements\u2019 of Hersh\u2019s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby\u2019s testimony had substantiated \u2018many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today we\u2019re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh\u2019s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.<\/span>

<\/span>Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider\u2014who was then an editor at the WaPo\u2014summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh\u2019s revelations:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cthe press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My how we\u2019ve grown so much in the 40 years since.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t know how much of Hersh’s story is true, but the press response at this point seems to exquisitely lame.<\/p>\n

Background, and underlying story here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been two cogent and well written critiques of the generally dismissive response of the mainstream media to Seymour Hersh’s story which claims to show that the official narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing was largely untrue. The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review is likely to gain the most currency. It’s a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,1011,1129,1103,1076],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-history","category-journalism","category-secrecy","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}