This title used for Mr Hersh reminds me, somewhat appropriately, an old Soviet/Jewish joke: A local Communist party secretary asks Rabinovitch why the latter missed the last party meeting. "Why, if I had known it's the last one I'd have brought my whole family!" declares Rabinovitch.
So with Seymour Hersh: I sincerely hope he is the last of the kind. James Kirchick in his article The Deceits of Seymour Hersh helps to explain why.
“If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago,” Hersh told the Progressive in 1998. That Hersh has continued to rise, rather than suffer professional admonishment for his perennial falsehoods, is a testament to the ideological usefulness of his deceits to the people who publish him and the people who praise him. The disgrace is one in which Hersh’s editors and legions of readers are also complicit, and will continue to be for as long as “the last great American reporter” goes on telling them the lies they want to hear.More where this comes from.
6 comments:
Ah just one of many people whose views I don't give damn about
Oh, that for sure, but so many people swear by New Yorker in general and Hersch in particular...
Everybody in the news biz makes mistakes. That's what corrections are for. Hersh, though, starts from a mistake and skips the correction.
That was precisely my impression from what I've read of his "work".
Seymour Hersh use to be a great reporter, but over the last 30 years, he has really gone down hill: His book about Nixon and Kissinger, "The Price of Power", was so totally unremitting and unfairly negative about both men as to make me feel sorry for Nixon and Kissinger, which is not an easy thing to do! Hersh's book, "The Dark Side of Camelot" was a collection of all the negative stories that had ever been told about JFK without any real effort to determine their truthfulness or even to separate the stories that conflicted with one another. Some of his material might have had some truth in it, but which ones?!
Inquiry: How many years in the Gulag did Rabinovitch get for his wonderful joke about the last Party meeting?
It will take a lot to make me feel sorry for Nixon, and I didn't read the book. But I believe you, David.
Yeah, as for the fate of Rabinovich: I guess he spent some time being reeducated ;-)
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