Re:Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
by BryantD on Friday February 10, 2023 @02:38PM
(#34744631)
His ad hoc speeches during the Abu Ghraib reporting were also not fact checked, and he said some things which he later admitted were exaggerations. Some reporters need the discipline of fact checking; Hersh has always been very good when he had that, and very bad when he does not.
The Abu Ghraib report was published by the New Yorker, which has fact checkers on staff. You cannot tell their stuff "my source is anonymous" and not have them confirm that source: the public may not know Hersh's sources for that work, but the New Yorker does.
Hersh's recent work is self published and not fact checked. Moreover, it is wild, and often logically at odds with itself (This operation was extremely secret, and yet the Treasury department was involved?). So: times have changed.
I love Substack, but Substack doesn't solve your reputation problem for you: if you were reliant on your editor to check your work (as Hersh clearly was), Substack gives you nothing to help out with that. It's a different world now, unfortunately, and it's made a crank out of Hersh.