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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 7/24/18

America's Reporter: the Hersh Method

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(6) Resist intimidation. One of the realities of being a journalist is that you always face intimidation of one kind or another. Murder and imprisonment are the harshest sentences. But there is an everyday quality by which the state and corporations go after reporters. Hersh tells many such stories, including when high government officials would call him up to make him uncomfortable or scared. "You're Jewish, aren't you, Seymour?" asked Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger's loyal deputy. This must have rankled. It was in the context of Hersh's story about Kissinger and the wiretapping of just about everyone. Hersh stood firm.

All this is fine, but how does one make a living if one follows the Hersh method? Which news house would tolerate this kind of reporter, not only by financing them for extended periods of time as they chased important stories, but also by allowing them to question the government and corporations? Nobody hired Hersh for the totality of his career. He sought a long-term deal with The New York Times but could not get it. "How's my little commie?" Abe Rosenthal, his boss at The New York Times, said to him in 1971. Hersh says he wrote in the "golden age of journalism," but his own career was idiosyncratic, funded by an article here or there, a short stint here or there, a book deal here or there. While Hersh grumbles about freelance journalism, his entire career seems peppered with examples of the freelance life.

So much more could be said about Reporter. One hopes that Hersh will come back and write another book about matters to which he alludes at the close of this one. Some of his most important stories in recent years have been about the allegations of the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Hersh's stories, which raised important questions about the validity of these allegations, had been reported mainly from U.S. government sources. He does not say enough about these stories. One would like to know more. One would like, as well, to know why U.S. publications had refused to run these stories, which eventually ran in British and German publications. "I will happily permit history to be the judge of my recent work," he writes in the final pages. But this is not enough. Hersh is a good raconteur of the process of his reporting. I would have liked more of his sense of those stories and his judgment about how they were squelched and then received.

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Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair of South Asian History and Director of International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT His most recent book, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, won the Muzaffar (more...)
 

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