Seymour Hersh shows the difference between a reporter and a stenographer

Seymour Hersh is a legendary investigative reporter who has broken many major stories, perhaps most famously the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the torture by the US in Abu Ghraib. He has just published a memoir Reporter and Matt Taibbi says that current journalists could learn a lot from Hersh from the way he describes how he got information. Taibbi points to a story Hersh tells about what happened when he was preparing to write a story in 1999 in the New Yorker about Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard,
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Obama, bin Laden, and Seymour Hersh

President Obama and the national security state have reaped great political rewards from the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. It enabled him to run for re-election on the swagger of ordering a bold raid to do what his predecessor could not do. It enabled the CIA and the NSA to claim that their clever sleuthing was what enabled the US to locate bin Laden in Pakistan. It justified the use of torture by claiming that this was what got them vital information. And it enabled the US military and its much vaunted Special Forces to glory in successfully going in, carrying out a raid in a foreign country under the noses of that government, and then get out again without that country’s military being any the wiser. Even Obama’s political adversaries had no counter to vice-president Joe Biden’s boast during the 2012 campaign that it was thanks to Obama that “General Motors is alive and bin Laden is dead.”
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Book review: Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh

I am not in general a fan of the memoir genre but when I heard that legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had written one, I rushed out to buy a copy the day it was released because I knew it would be good. And I was not disappointed. The book is excellent, containing details of how he arrived at his stories and should be required reading for anyone who wants to be a good reporter because he tells you how he went about getting important information. As I read it I started marking various passages to quote in a review but they became so numerous that there is no way that I can do so without this becoming very lengthy. What I will do is from time to quote from sections of it as it relates to other topics I write about.
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The guilt and shame of killing someone

Life is such a precious gift that unless one is a sociopath, killing someone is such a horrific thing that one shies away from it. It takes extraordinary circumstances for someone to lose control of themselves sufficiently to kill another human being. So governments have elaborate methods by which they encourage ordinary people to join their military and then turn them into killers. These involve training them to unquestioningly follow orders and to dehumanize those perceive as the enemy, by portraying them as less than human or so outlandishly evil that they deserve to die, and to shower the killers with medals and honors upon their return in order to make them feel like heroes.
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Finally, a police officer found guilty of murder

A jury in Texas has found a police officer Roy Oliver guilty for the murder of Jordan Edwards, a 15-year old unarmed black youth, while he was a passenger in car driving by. The story was a familiar one in which the officer argued that the boy and his friends had been acting aggressively towards his partner and that he had been forced to fire at them in defense. But the body cam videos showed a very different story, that the car had been moving away.
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The growth of nonprofit news media

The traditional news media, faced with filling in every single moment with content that will draw in viewers that can be sold to advertisers, has descended into the pattern that we see, of talking heads who are selected because it is already known what they will say and can be counted on to argue with each other without adding much useful knowledge. In this drive fro phony drama and confrontations, resources for real investigative reporting that requires a lot of digging and analysis, get squeezed out as being too expensive. As Seymour Hersh says in his book Reporter, the worst words a reporter can say are “I think”. But that is the most common phrase in these shows as people speculate about things they don’t know or try to predict the future.
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“I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer”

As promised in my review of Seymour Hersh’s excellent memoir Reporter, here is an excerpt that describes how he found out about Paul Meadlo, one of the people in the platoon that committed the My Lai massacre. Hersh had seen a small news item about a young journalist named Ron Ridenhour who had heard about the massacre and sent reports to the army top brass about what he had heard and been frustrated by the lack of action and feared a cover-up. After talking with Ridenhour, Hersh got the name of Michael Terry, a soldier in that same platoon, and went to see him.
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When it comes to warmongering, the establishment is united

In reading the news, one would think that the mainstream media and the Trump administration are at loggerheads. But when it comes to warmongering, they are united. Note the strange silence surrounding Seymour Hersh’s reporting about the doubtful evidence that Syria had used sarin gas in the bombing in Idlib, Syria in April. Given that Donald Trump had made the use of that nerve gas as the prime reason for his launching of missiles at a Syrian airbase, you would think that they would have covered the story, even if just to refute it.
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Another attack based on lies?

When there was a ghastly tragedy on April 4th, 2017 in Idlib, Syria that killed a large number of civilians, there were immediate media reports that it was due to a sarin chemical attack by the Syrian government, aided by their ally Russia. The Trump administration was quick to accept this claim and less than two days later, Trump made an emotional speech about the deaths of children to justify the US unleashing a missile attack on a Syrian airfield to supposedly punish Syria for the attack.
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