A good friend of mine bought me a copy of Reporter: A Memoir by the incomparable Seymour M. Hersh (2018).
The book gives us a sense of what’s at stake when the current American president calls journalists the “enemy of the people.”
Hersh rose through the ranks at the Associated Press wire service and in 1966 became Pentagon correspondent at the height of the American war in Vietnam.
It’s often said that a “built-in, shockproof bullshit detector” is the essential quality of a good writer.
It was this quality that led to Hersh’s biggest breakthough: his exposé of the Mai Lai Massacre, a murderous rampage by US troops in a tiny Vietnamese village.
Several hundred unarmed civilians were wiped out and the US military tried to cover it up.
Hersh’s unflinching, painstaking work on exposing that atrocity contributed to a shift in public opinion against the war.
The research required him to overcome an absurd series of obstacles. At one point, he literally outran a military officer at Fort Benning, Ga., as he searched for a source.
Decades later, he was still uncovering scandal.
Perhaps most notably, following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Hersh revealed the shocking abuse of prisoners at the Abu Graib prison.
Significantly, Hersh frequently depended on classified information from officials within the government or military whose loyalty wasn’t a matter of simple obedience to authorities like presidents or generals, but to the US Constitution.
Hersh went to great lengths to protect the anonymity of his sources.
For example, during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon kept track of visits to military officials by journalists to help trace leaks to their source.
For this reason, Hersh would schedule a round of interviews with officials other than the tipster, just to cover his tracks.
More recently, Hersh notes that source protection frustrated his attempts to write a book about abuses of power under Dick Cheney, vice-president under George W. Bush. Hersh eventually shelved that effort and turned to his memoirs.
The new book by Hersh comes as President Donald Trump continues a campaign of hostility towards the press, repeatedly calling them “enemy of the people” while whipping up anger towards the so-called “fake news” at his rallies.
Most recently, Trump escalated his attacks on the “failing New York Times” after it printed an anonymous op-ed from a top official.
The article told us that the president is dangerously unstable – common knowledge – and that senior government appointees are secretly thwarting him, which many of us already assumed was taking place.
Attacks on journalists aren’t limited to Trump’s buffoonish rhetoric.
One only has to glance at the website of a group such as Reporters Without Borders to see that reporters are routinely being jailed or murdered in countries including the Philippines and Egypt.
In this world, the survival of a vibrant culture of journalism – the kind with teeth – is far from guaranteed.
Hersh’s reflections provide a reminder of what it’s all about, and why some of us got into this business to begin with.
@davidgordonkoch
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