Lire absolument: The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful - Columbia Journalism Review
▻http://www.cjr.org/analysis/seymour_hersh_osama_bin_laden.php
As a simple example, which Hersh himself stated in this fascinating On The Media interview, how many people knew about the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence before the Iraq war? Hundreds? Over a thousand? How many knew about the NSA’s mass phone metadata program aimed at Americans until Edward Snowden revealed it? A thousand? Ten thousand? It stayed secret for more than seven years until a single person—a contractor, not an NSA employee—exposed it.
If that doesn’t convince you, read about two other recent agreements about assassinations, one with Pakistan and another with Yemen. Both stayed secret for years without the public knowing. The old adage that “three people can only keep a secret if two are dead” is a fantasy, and journalists should stop mindlessly repeating it.
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All this brings to mind a story from earlier in Hersh’s career, when, as a relatively unknown reporter in Vietnam, he put together the pieces of his My Lai scoop. At first, no one would listen. He tried to sell the story to Life and Look; both turned him down. It ended up going out on a little known wire service known as Dispatch News Service. Twenty of Dispatch’s 50 customers rejected it.
Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.
