Seymour Hersh (Credit: Reuters/Fadi Al-assaad)The 76-year-old Hersh, who made his name by reporting the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War — and who also revealed torture at Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker in 2004 — leveled a scathing indictment of contemporary American journalism, describing it as a field littered with timid careerists and water-carrying hacks.
“Our job [as journalists] is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – ‘here’s a debate’ our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who’s right and who’s wrong about issues,” Hersh said. “That doesn’t happen enough. It costs money, it costs time, it jeopardizes, it raises risks. There are some people – the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it’s like you don’t dare be an outsider any more.”
