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.
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