[Marxism] Seymour M. Hersh — the Journalist as Lone Wolf
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (Coming back from a run in Central Park yesterday, I stopped in at Barnes and Noble to see if they had a copy of "Reporter" to check what Hersh had to say about chemical attacks in Syria. There was only a perfunctory defense of his reporting amounting to less than a thousand words. Either his editor wised him up to lay off or he finally figured out that he wasn't serving his legacy well by trafficking in conspiracy theories. I'll probably get around to reading it at some point since browsing other pages revealed a very candid and witty memoir.) NY Times Sunday Book Review, June 17, 2018 Seymour M. Hersh — the Journalist as Lone Wolf By Alan Rusbridger REPORTER A Memoir By Seymour M. Hersh Illustrated. 355 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95. The lone wolf — in journalism, as in nature — is a rare creature. Many reporters prefer the reassuring comfort of the pack. But every age throws up a few hunters who prefer to go it alone, scorning the safety and consensus of the crowd. They are often noble beasts, even if they can present formidable challenges to their handlers. Seymour M. Hersh (better known as Sy) is perhaps the most notable lone wolf of his generation. Now 81, he has nearly always operated on his own: There has been no Bernstein to his Woodward; no investigative team into which he could easily blend. He broke some of the biggest stories of his time. He fell out with editors. He threw typewriters through windows. He could be petulant, unreasonably stubborn and prudish. But, boy, could he report. His memoir is — with some niggling reservations — a master class in the craft of reporting. People sometimes shorthand the act of dogged discovery as “shoe leather” journalism — pounding pavements rather than sitting at the desk Googling. In Hersh’s case reporting involved long hours in libraries as well as jumping on last-minute flights to far-off small towns to hunt down reluctant witnesses. It meant knocking on doors in the middle of the night; learning how to read documents upside down while pretending to make notes; painstakingly cultivating retired generals; showing empathy, winning trust. His chosen areas of investigation were often the hardest to penetrate: He burrows away at the secrecy of the state, the military, intelligence, foreign policy and giant corporations. Over nearly six decades he exposed brutality, deception, torture, illegal surveillance, government-sponsored fake news and much else. More often than not — much more often — he was right. From the My Lai massacre of 1968 to the degrading treatment of detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, Hersh delivered the goods. He introduces himself as a survivor from the golden age of journalism, “when reporters for daily newspapers did not have to compete with the 24-hour cable news cycle, when newspapers were flush with cash from display advertisements and want ads, and when I was free to travel anywhere, anytime, for any reason, with company credit cards.” Back then reporters were given the time and money to tell “important and unwanted truths” and made America “a more knowledgeable place.” He makes the classic case for public interest journalism. The book has its journalistic heroes — Harrison Salisbury, I. F. Stone, Neil Sheehan, Bob Woodward among them — and political villains, including Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger (“the man lied the way most people breathed”), Dick Cheney and neocons. It also has its editorial enemies. He scorns the practitioners of “he said, she said” journalism as stenographers. He ridicules reporters who claim not to have an opinion on what they’re writing about. He chides other news organizations for not following up his exclusives. He holds in especial contempt the Vietnam-era press room of the Pentagon for what he regarded as its collective lazy gullibility. The skepticism that made him such a considerable reporter extended to the organizations that employed him and the editors who commissioned him. There is a fine line, in Hersh’s ever-suspicious mind, between editing and censorship. His nose was always twitching for a sniff of cowardice or collusion. On one occasion he investigates his own editor, suspecting that a loan from the company’s directors to help him buy an apartment could have compromised him when he should have been solely “beholden to the newsroom and the men and women in it.” That editor was A. M. Rosenthal, executive editor of this newspaper from 1977 to 1986, one of several editors with whom Hersh had a complicated relationship torn between mutual respect and something close to despair. Hersh — brought up
[Marxism] Seymour M. Hersh — the Journalist as Lone Wolf
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times, June 13, 2018 Seymour M. Hersh — the Journalist as Lone Wolf By Alan Rusbridger REPORTER A Memoir By Seymour M. Hersh Illustrated. 355 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95. The lone wolf — in journalism, as in nature — is a rare creature. Many reporters prefer the reassuring comfort of the pack. But every age throws up a few hunters who prefer to go it alone, scorning the safety and consensus of the crowd. They are often noble beasts, even if they can present formidable challenges to their handlers. Seymour M. Hersh (better known as Sy) is perhaps the most notable lone wolf of his generation. Now 81, he has nearly always operated on his own: There has been no Bernstein to his Woodward; no investigative team into which he could easily blend. He broke some of the biggest stories of his time. He fell out with editors. He threw typewriters through windows. He could be petulant, unreasonably stubborn and prudish. But, boy, could he report. His memoir is — with some niggling reservations — a master class in the craft of reporting. People sometimes shorthand the act of dogged discovery as “shoe leather” journalism — pounding pavements rather than sitting at the desk Googling. In Hersh’s case reporting involved long hours in libraries as well as jumping on last-minute flights to far-off small towns to hunt down reluctant witnesses. It meant knocking on doors in the middle of the night; learning how to read documents upside down while pretending to make notes; painstakingly cultivating retired generals; showing empathy, winning trust. His chosen areas of investigation were often the hardest to penetrate: He burrows away at the secrecy of the state, the military, intelligence, foreign policy and giant corporations. Over nearly six decades he exposed brutality, deception, torture, illegal surveillance, government-sponsored fake news and much else. More often than not — much more often — he was right. From the My Lai massacre of 1968 to the degrading treatment of detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, Hersh delivered the goods. He introduces himself as a survivor from the golden age of journalism, “when reporters for daily newspapers did not have to compete with the 24-hour cable news cycle, when newspapers were flush with cash from display advertisements and want ads, and when I was free to travel anywhere, anytime, for any reason, with company credit cards.” Back then reporters were given the time and money to tell “important and unwanted truths” and made America “a more knowledgeable place.” He makes the classic case for public interest journalism. The book has its journalistic heroes — Harrison Salisbury, I. F. Stone, Neil Sheehan, Bob Woodward among them — and political villains, including Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger (“the man lied the way most people breathed”), Dick Cheney and neocons. It also has its editorial enemies. He scorns the practitioners of “he said, she said” journalism as stenographers. He ridicules reporters who claim not to have an opinion on what they’re writing about. He chides other news organizations for not following up his exclusives. He holds in especial contempt the Vietnam-era press room of the Pentagon for what he regarded as its collective lazy gullibility. The skepticism that made him such a considerable reporter extended to the organizations that employed him and the editors who commissioned him. There is a fine line, in Hersh’s ever-suspicious mind, between editing and censorship. His nose was always twitching for a sniff of cowardice or collusion. On one occasion he investigates his own editor, suspecting that a loan from the company’s directors to help him buy an apartment could have compromised him when he should have been solely “beholden to the newsroom and the men and women in it.” That editor was A. M. Rosenthal, executive editor of this newspaper from 1977 to 1986, one of several editors with whom Hersh had a complicated relationship torn between mutual respect and something close to despair. Hersh — brought up in a lower-middle-class family on the South Side of Chicago — grew up revering The New York Times and is beyond honored when he finally makes it to the paper in 1972. But the story of Hersh and The Times involves a troubled courtship; a sometimes happy marriage; a trial separation and eventual divorce. His work on Vietnam — an “obsession” he thought he shared with Rosenthal — initially appeared to please his editor, though Rosenthal was ever anxious about his “little commie” reporter’s overt politics. But the paper — being comprehensively outgunned by The
