Seymour Hersh on My Lai and the state of investigative journalism

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I heard you give a talk years ago, and I’m paraphrasing, but you said something like, “If you want to push back on the establishment, you have to be empirical about it. Do it with reporting.” Do you still believe that? Is that your method?

The only thing I can tell you is that there’s an awful lot of good people in the government, believe it or not—an awful lot of people who don’t like lying. A lot of people in the military who get up to high positions and can’t stand what they had to do to get there and try to stop what they’re doing. A lot of people in the intelligence community that, you know.

And it’s the lying that’s the vehicle for me. The other vehicle also the generic notion of counter-narrative.

I worked for The New York Times for nine years, under Abe Rosenthal, who was a very conservative guy. I always joke, he used to come into the newsroom in Washington and tap me on the top of my head and say, “How’s my little commie?” The next sentence would be, “What do you have for me?”

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And there are counter-narratives to stories. And the problem is, you get to a place like The New York Times, and I saw it from the inside, where it’s all about access. So you trade, in effect—not everybody, but too many reporters—they could trade, I could almost argue, their integrity for the access. Their curiosity, let’s put it in an easier way.

http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/seymour_hersh_mai_lai.php