.
9/27/13, "Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media," UK Guardian, Lisa O'Carroll
"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....
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....
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....
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....
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."
=========================
9/28/13, "Not ONE word of official account of raid that killed Bin Laden is true, claims award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh," UK Daily Mail, Marie-Louise Olson
"A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
says that the official account of the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden
in 2011 is ‘one big lie’. Seymour Hersh, 76, said that ‘not one word’ of the Obama administration’s narrative on what happened is true.
In an interview with The Guardian
published today, Hersh savages the US media for failing to challenge
the White House on a whole host of issues, from NSA spying, to drone
attacks, to aggression against Syria.
He said the Navy Seal raid that
supposedly resulted in the death of the Al-Qaeda terror leader, Hersh
said, ‘not one word of it is true’.
According
to Hersh - who first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing
the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which
he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting - the
problem is that the US media is allowing the Obama administration to get
away with lying.
‘It’s pathetic. They are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama].’
The White House has refused to publicly release images of Bin Laden’s body, fuelling suspicion they are withholding information.
Although the White House said the
corpse was immediately ‘buried at sea’ within 24 hours of his death in
line with Islamic tradition, it quickly emerged that this was not
standard practice. It has also been suggested that the White House has changed its story multiple times, according to infowars.com.
They initially claimed that
pictures from the ‘situation room’ show Obama, Vice President Joe Biden,
Hilary Clinton and the rest of the security team watching the raid
live, when in fact there was a blackout on the feed.
Neighbours close to the Pakistani compound in Abbottabad also said they had never seen Bin Laden in the area.
Hersh said the American press spends ‘so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would’.
In
his opinion, the solution would be to shut down news networks like NBC
and ABC and fire 90 per cent of mainstream editors and replace them with
‘real’ journalists who are not afraid to speak truth to power.
‘The republic’s in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple,’ he said." via Free Republic
=========================
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