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In a Frontline article
*http://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/white-lies/article7239187.ece),
Vijay Prashad wrote:
->One of the most frequent criticisms against Hersh is that he uses
anonymous sources. This is certainly the case. Why do journalists like
Hersh rely on anonymous sources? One of the reasons is that the U.S.
government is ruthless in its treatment of whistle-blowers. The Barack
Obama administration, more than any previous one, has used the Espionage
Act against any government official who leaks information that is
inconvenient to it. Most recently, Jeffrey Sterling, an undercover CIA
officer, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for letting
The New York Times reporter James Risen know about Operation Merlin—a
covert campaign by the U.S. government to sell Iran flawed material for
its nuclear programme. That Hersh uses anonymous sources is nothing new.
Most articles on national security rely on “senior government officials”
or a “senior White House official who is not authorised to speak
publicly”. Such formal criticism of Hersh’s reporting is misplaced, or
even malicious.<-
I am not exactly sure what makes Vijay think that there are "frequent
criticisms" of Hersh for using anonymous sources. I just did a quick
check on Google and could find none from authoritative sources. In fact,
the very first item that shows up was written by Kurt Anderson, the
editor of New York Magazine, a glossy middle-class publication that
features the articles of Jonathan Chait, an obnoxious DLC type who hates
the left. Anderson answered the question "Why do journalists use
anonymous sources?" this way:
"Because people who are willing to tell reporters interesting
things—that is, confidential or disturbing information or opinions—are
usually disinclined to appear to be the candid plain talkers or snitches
or whistle-blowers or gossips or backstabbers they are."
Furthermore, the only article returned by Google on the first page of
results critical of Hersh's use of unnamed sources was written by me. My
concern was about Hersh obviously using someone like Ray McGovern or
some other pro-Assad ideologue in bolstering his bullshit claim that the
Syrian rebels killed their own families in East Ghouta. I wrote:
Ever since Seymour Hersh’s “Whose Sarin” article appeared in the London
Review of Books, there’s something that’s been nagging at me that I
couldn’t put my finger on. This afternoon it all became clear to me.
Instead of describing it, I think a couple of examples should suffice:
A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama
administration had altered the available information – in terms of its
timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make
intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been
picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.
–Seymour Hersh, Whose Sarin?
Hussein’s staying power is remarkable. In the months after he invaded
Kuwait in 1990, the United States learned of several attempts on his
life that he thwarted. “We had knowledge of at least one,” said a former
senior official from the first Bush administration. After U.S. and
coalition forces defeated and drove Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in
March 1991, inflicting one of the largest and most visible military
humiliations of the post-Vietnam period, the former official said, “We
thought some colonel or brigadier general would march in and shoot him.”
–Bob Woodward, The Washington Post, June 16, 2002
Now stop and ask yourself when was the last time that someone like Glenn
Greenwald cited a “former senior official”? Or when Alexander Cockburn
was alive, can you remember him ever citing some unnamed source either
currently or formerly ensconced in the CIA or the State Department?
The simple fact of the matter is that their reputations preceded them.
Nobody in the CIA would ever spend 5 minutes “spilling the beans” to a
Glenn Greenwald or an Alexander Cockburn. The use of unnamed sources at
the highest echelons of the “deep state” is characteristic of bourgeois
journalism. The only reason we give someone like Seymour Hersh a free
pass on an article larded in just about every paragraph with
oh-so-impressive unnamed sources is because he broke the My Lai story 44
years ago. He went on to write some other important investigative pieces
in the 1990s but for the past 20 years or so, his reporting has mostly
followed the same trajectory as Woodward’s but from the left side of the
ledger rather than the center-right.
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2013/12/18/seymour-hersh-and-his-unnamed-sources/
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