In an interview with The Guardian (U.K.) published Friday, the left-leaning Seymour Hersh, best known for his Pulitzer-winning reporting that exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, unloaded on the American news media for its underwhelming coverage of the Obama White House.
Hersh told The Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll that the ABC and NBC news bureaus ought to be shut down and 90 percent of the editors fired for sake of fixing journalism.
“I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90 percent of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control,” Hersh said. “I saw it in The New York Times, I see people who get promoted are the ones on the desk who are more amenable to the publisher and what the senior editors want and the trouble makers don’t get promoted. Start promoting better people who look you in the eye and say ‘I don’t care what you say.'”
The brunt of Hersh’s criticism was aimed at the U.S. media for its unwillingness to criticize the current commander in chief, Barack Obama, specifically for the narrative put out by his White House following the 2011 U.S. Navy Seal raid that resulted in the death of terrorist ringleader Osama bin Laden.
“It’s pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama],” he said to The Guardian. “It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn’t happen anymore. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president.”
According to the story, Hersh is in the process of writing a book about national security with an entire chapter dedicated to the bin Laden raid, which he insisted to O’Carroll was “one big lie.”
Don’t even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends “so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would” — or the death of Osama bin Laden. “Nothing’s been done about that story, it’s one big lie, not one word of it is true,” he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.
Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine whose reporting over the years has exposed the aforementioned 1968 My Lai massacre in South Vietnam and the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004.
But Hersh has also been criticized for a number of his inaccurate claims about both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. Also in 1997 in his book “The Dark Side of Camelot” about former President John F. Kennedy, Hersh was accused of falling for a hoax when he revealed details about the Kennedys from a series of forged documents that included allegations of an affair between Marilyn Monroe and Kennedy.
