Don J. Usner
Seymour Hersh began working as a reporter in Chicago in 1959. He is perhaps best known for his 1969 exposé of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai by troops under the command of William Calley. Hersh has just released a new autobiography called, simply, Reporter: A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf, June 5, 2018). He spoke recently by telephone with The Progressive about the book and the state of journalism today.
Q: I’d like to start out by talking about the state of media today. You talk in the book about how the cable news cycle drives people to go to press before something is really ready.
Seymour Hersh: There’s no question. You don’t take time to work on a story. You don’t really look beyond the facts. The New York Times in March, I think, of 2015, just rushed the story into print: “Hillary Clinton had a secret Gmail program,” and they published it without [taking the time to get all the facts]. It wasn’t the fault of the reporter who did it. I’m sure that there was probably two days of reporting, and you confirm they had a Gmail account, and boom, into print he went. That’s absolutely against common sense and practice.
The other problem is we’re a country that is very divided. And so the people in the middle have nowhere to turn. You just turn on your TV and, if you like Trump, you watch Fox. If you don’t like Trump, you watch one of the other cable companies. And there’s no middle ground, nobody there to say this is what it is.
Q: What are some of the stories that we’re missing because we’re focused on the bread and circuses of the Trump Administration and not what’s going on behind the scenes?
Hersh: Well, one thing would’ve been a really good study of why did Hillary lose? Why didn’t the press [see it coming?] The New York Times publisher wrote a letter afterwards, a statement in the paper saying, “we apologize for getting it wrong.” They had Hillary as a very high percentage winning on the day before. There were a lot of people who thought that was just crazy. All you had to do is drive in the countryside, and you were in America. You didn’t see Hillary signs, you saw nothing but Trump. But they didn’t do that.
There’s a couple lessons that reporters have to keep in mind. One of them is, read before you write.
These are the same people who in 2002 and 2003, before the attack on Iraq, reassured us that there was high confidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So when I hear the same high confidence expressed about how we absolutely are sure the Russians hacked into Tony Podesta’s emails, and that got information that made it impossible for Hillary to win, and that’s why she lost the election . . . I mean, come on. Where’s the evidence?
Q: In the book, you talk about some of the stories you did not report. One was very early in your career when you heard the two cops talking to each other about basically shooting a . .
Hersh: The word they used was “nigger.” I was three or four months into being a reporter, working for the City News Bureau of Chicago. I worked the overnight shift as the new kid. Most of the time it was quiet, but two or three times a week, you’d get something going on the police radios. Well, two cops reported they were coming in to Central Police, and they had a suspect who had tried to run, and they chased him, and in the end, they had to shoot him. I thought, that is pretty interesting. So instead of waiting for them to get to the police headquarters, I ran down into the parking garage.
As I got there, the two cops had just rolled in. They were getting out of the car, and another cop, who had heard the same radio dispatch said to one of them, so the guy tried to run on you, huh? And one of the cops said, nah, we told the nigger, it’s okay, beat it. Then we shot him. And I was like, what? What did I just hear?
I immediately called my editor, and I said I’ve got something really unbelievable. I told him what I had, and my editor said forget it. A couple days later, I ambled over to the coroner’s office and found the [autopsy record]. They had identified him, and there were bullets in the back.
So I called the office again, the editors at the City News Bureau, and they all said the same thing, it’s not going to happen, Hersh. So I went in the Army very much convinced that, while I loved the profession, it was far from perfect. In fact, self-censorship was a major, major issue in daily reporting, and I had gone along with it. And there was a lot of ways to do what I did better, and I also was in need of doing it better.
Q: But in a sense, you sort of learned a lesson from that. In your later career, you did go against the advice of editors, and sometimes ended up publishing outside of your own publication, in other papers like the National Catholic Reporter. So you did kind of take that lesson to heart.
Hersh: Well, yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that it’s a lesson to follow. I’m now what, fifty years into the business, and I’m still doing it. At the AP and at The New York Times, where I worked for about eight or nine years on Watergate and CIA, and at The New Yorker, where I had a wonderful time working with a wonderful editor, Dave Remnick. There’s a certain point at which editors begin to get tired of some guy walking into their office and throwing a dead rat full of lice on their desk and saying, Okay, this is what I’m doing next.
We’re in a hyped-up business where news is now dominated by this twenty-four-hour news cycle that’s pernicious.
At the AP, I ran into trouble over my coverage of the Vietnam War. And at The New York Times, I ended up in trouble because I wanted to cover corporations very toughly. At The New Yorker, I ran into the same problem.
Q: What lessons did you learn about sources?
Hersh: Well, I learned this covering the Pentagon in ’65 and ’66. You find those guys in the military and the intelligence business who love what they’re doing, really believe this is the right way to spend their life on behalf of the country. They understand they’ve taken an oath of the office through the constitution and not to a President or to a general. And those are the jewels. You [need to] find those guys. And there were people that I found in 1965 that I stayed friendly with for thirty years. I’m still friendly with a lot of people that I knew back them.
There’s something wonderful about a guy that’s willing to go take a bullet for America and also stand up to his bosses, and also understand that what he was doing may have been mass murder, and that’s a terrible feeling. And I can help somebody, because he can wake up one day and say I’m going to tell Hersh what’s going on. And that night, his head is lighter because he’s taken that massive junk in his head and put it on my head.
Q: You talk in your book about coming out of the old school of journalism. You mention that you still do a lot of your work with a pen and paper. How is journalism changing now?
Hersh: Well, as I said in the beginning, we’re in a hyped-up business where news is now dominated by this twenty-four-hour news cycle that’s pernicious. Information that comes directly from the White House is just flushed down the air, not checked, every story has a shelf life of maybe two or three news cycles now, and that there’s no real effort to do any systematic [work].
There hasn’t been a serious documentary done by the three American networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, [in] a decade. It’s not serious journalism. Hour-long documentaries about something in which you provide some new information are left to public television. HBO does a few. CNN will do a few. But, basically the big main networks, are out of the business.
Now anybody can put a story on Web page and out it goes. Some stories just fly off on the Internet. But I don’t think the basic principles have changed. The outlets are more interesting because the Internet is a tremendous tool. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still do the kind of reporting it takes to get good stories out. I’ve always done what we call well-informed journalism. I’ve always been paid to spend months on a story. But that [era is] ending.
Q: I wonder if you have some words of advice to journalists as we kind of try to navigate this new landscape.
There’s a couple lessons that reporters have to keep in mind. One of them is, read before you write. I hate seeing somebody, a good reporter, let’s say it’s The New York Times, The Washington Post, dash into print with another story about Trump said this, and how crazy that is, and what a bunch of crap it is. And then you see the guy that night on one of the cable news shows, pontificating about what he wrote. It’s just crazy to me, just crazy. I still think you have to get the hell out of the way of the story.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.