[D66] Seymour Hersh’s Reporter: A life exposing government lies and crimes

[A.O.]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/03/pers-a29.html
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/79187/reporter-by-seymour-m-hersh/9780307263957/

Seymour Hersh’s Reporter: A life exposing government lies and crimes
By Andre Damon
3 September 2018

Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who played a leading role in
exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre and the Bush administration’s torture
of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, has published a long-awaited autobiography.
Seymour Hersh's Reporter

Hersh is one of the world’s most renowned investigative journalists. But
despite his decades of journalistic experience, which won him numerous
awards, including the Pullitzer Prize, two National Magazine Awards and
five George Polk Awards, Hersh has been all but ostracized by the
American press.

No prominent American, or for that matter British, newspapers or
periodicals, will publish his stories. And each one of his exposures are
met with vituperative denunciations, or worse—silence.

But there is nothing defensive about his memoir. Instead, Hersh has
written the story of his own colorful life the same way he writes his
articles. The book is a clear, gripping narrative from beginning to end,
describing, first-hand, the revelation of some of the greatest crimes
since the second world war.

The book’s title, Reporter, reflects its contents. The memoir is not, at
first glance, a rebuttal to his contemporary critics, who call him an
apologist for the Putin government because he dares question the CIA’s
narrative of foreign policy; rather, he often puts the most generous
interpretations on the actions of his fellow journalists.

In narrating his life, he is narrating what a reporter does, beginning
with a profound skepticism about everything, most of all official
statements. If the book has a leitmotif, it’s the phrase, “If your
mother says she loves you, check it out,” meaning that the job of the
reporter is to question and independently verify everything he hears.

The clear, but unstated, allegation of Hersh’s book is: “I am a real
reporter, and my critics are not.”

Hersh phrases it more diplomatically in his preface:

    “I am a survivor from the golden age of journalism,” he writes.
“There were no televised panels of ‘experts’ and journalists on cable TV
who began every answer to every question with the two deadliest words in
the media world—'I think.’”

    “The newspapers of today far too often rush into print with stories
that are essentially little more than tips, or hints of something toxic
or criminal. For lack of time, money, or skilled staff, we are besieged
with ‘he said, she said’ stories in which the reporter is little more
than a parrot. I always thought it was a newspaper’s mission to search
out the truth and not merely to report on the dispute.”

“My career,” Hersh writes, “has been all about the importance of telling
important and unwanted truths and making America a more knowledgeable
place.”

[...]