15 ms·

When you qualify Hersh as one of journalism's least trustworthy figures, it's impossible to take the rest of your comment at face value.

dralley 4y ago
I think you have to separate Hersh pre-2010 and Hersh after-2010. He was once one of the greatest journalists in the world, but the last decade he has been putting out poorly-sourced, falsifiable garbage. Watch the interview he gave the other day (mentioned in this article) and tell me you walk away from it with more confidence that he's fully "there" as a journalist. He goes on a tangent about how Ukraine is doomed and Zelenskiy is killing his own people by resisting, even though 90% of the country is in favor of fighting to regain the occupied territory. He also doubles down on the ship being, specifically, the ALTA (and not any other ship), but the ALTA has been sitting in a scrap yard for 6 months.
- honkler 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - joshsyn 4y ago
    [dead]
  - pvg 4y ago
    Hersh stopped working within journalistic organizations, with their editors, fact-checkers, second-sourcing, etc - the organizations in which all his previous and more credible and verifiable work was done. That's a concrete fact, not 'tribalistic bias'. There's no basis whatsoever for you to attribute skepticism of recent Hersh to it, it's just namecalling.
    - pphysch 4y ago
      According to Hersh, he still does due diligence with editors and fact checking. He just doesn't have the brand sponsorships anymore.
      - mannerheim 4y ago
        And yet, somehow his work ends up error-laden and full of holes. Funny how that works out.
        pphysch 4y ago
        That's just not true. A handful of bloggers have nitpicked at it using publicly available information. All of Hersh's big stories received the same initial response of derision, going back to My Lai half a century ago [1]. Hersh, believe him or not, is not relying on publicly available information, but confidential sources. [1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1626279696827617290 https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/16262796968...
        mannerheim 4y ago
        'Chlorine is just a gas. It's not a chemical warfare weapon. You smell it, you run away.' Sure sounds like the words of somebody who isn't going senile!
      - graeme 4y ago
        There’s a difference between: 1. Convincing an editor to run your ideas under their masthead 2. Paying someone to edit your work, and running your ideas under your own masthead A newspaper is more than a brand. They put their reputation on the line when they publish. (You can make a good argument that many newspapers have trashed their own reputations, but that doesn’t negate the argument. When you self publish, you have no one vouching for you. Furthermore if you don’t like an editor or fact checker you can fire them)
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      Except that it’s legacy media who has eviscerated their reputation in the past decade. Eg, CNN has a lower viewership in the “key demo” than large YouTube news channels.
    - jrsj 4y ago
      Even if he wanted to work within those journalistic organizations and everything he said was true, they wouldn’t publish it. There’s really no other option for him at this point.
      - pvg 4y ago
        The fact they didn't want to work with him, after many years of him dropping huge bombshells they published, the literal foundation of his reputation, says more about his later work than than theirs, no? It's strange to claim his inability to find publishers for his non-verifiable work somehow confirms its credibility.
  - mturmon 4y ago
    You're jumping to a conclusion here -- sometimes the journalist does change. Plenty of political journalists go off the deep end at some point in their career. (Prof.) Mark Crispin Miller used to write well-researched essays on the culture of TV, now he believes that Sandy Hook was likely staged and that the standard explanation for 9/11 isn't true. Christopher Hitchens made a significant swerve to the right later in his career. Many colleagues and former friends of Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald feel the same way about what they have done.
    - honkler 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - nkozyra 4y ago
        Gross
    - zmgsabst 4y ago
      Those last two examples indicate you have a tribalistic bias though: Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald changed their politics which you’re implying impacts their credibility because their friends (fellow members of your tribe) said mean things about that. Further, why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility — and even mixed into a paragraph about hoaxes?
      - mturmon 4y ago
        > why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility...? Because, unfortunately to those who admired him, Christopher Hitchens allowed his disgust for Islamic fundamentalism to lead him to credulously advocate for a war that turned out to be based on a series of lies? Lies that he partly saw through, but that he decided to ignore in service of what for him was the larger good? It's an instructive episode.
        mturmon 4y ago
eduction 4y ago
I completely agree. He has a Pulitzer Prize, five Polk awards, two national magazine awards. Broke My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and exposed the Israeli nuclear program. He is easily the most accomplished journalist for several generations. That doesn’t automatically mean this story is right but to dismiss him in emotional and inaccurate terms doesn’t speak to a rational, evidence-based interpretation of the facts.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Seymour Hersh has also gone off the deep end lately. Some current examples[1]: * the Osama bin Laden raid was faked in a conspiracy with Pakistan and he was actually captured in 2006 * much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei * that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training * the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey Being right decades ago doesn't somehow absolve you of having to have verifiable sources and evidence when you go on to make numerous other claims that don't happen and no one can verify. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...
  - maybelsyrup 4y ago
    We live in a world where the CIA has a heart attack gun [1], a presidential administration faked evidence of WMD to go to war in Iraq, the CDC conducted secret medical torture on black men with syphilis, and the Pentagon sent JFK proposals to justify a war on Cuba by conducting false flag terrorist attacks against American civilians [2]. (JFK rejected them, apparently.) So I read a list like yours, and read you scoffing at the implausibility of any of those things, and I remember just how different we all can be. [1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-heart-attack-gun/2555371072001 https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
    - XorNot 4y ago
      Yes and you know what all those things have in common? Actual evidence which corresponds to real events, and multiple sources confirming that they happened. What Hersh's suppositions have is a stunning lack of verifiable evidence and observably factually incorrect assertions (as in the case of his articles on Nordstream).
kurthr 4y ago
Well, in the last decade he's kinda blown it with multiple claims in Syria. Statements that are either unbelievable, undocumented and easily could be (like building locations), or basically falsified have really brought down his trust. Even if he's just getting bad information rather than coming from a particular angle, his readers deserve better vetting of the material. At some point it feels like he's being driven by narrative more than facts that's a problem, and hanging out with Bashir Al Assad doesn't help to get the "real" story. Also note that Assad does have a particularly aligned geo-political supporter these days, who's directly involved. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/whose-sarin https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-hersh/military-to-military https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/06/25/will-get-fooled-seymour-hersh-welt-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack/ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/whatever-happened-to-seymour-hersh There's no such thing as a chlorine bomb- "Chlorine is just a gas. It's not a chemical warfare weapon. You smell it, you run away." - Seymore Hersh Tell that to soldiers in WWI.
- Mizza 4y ago
  Bellingcat is a way for UK/US spies to launder intelligence, a bootleg Wikileaks that won't challenge domestic power structures. I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously.
  - ninjagoo 4y ago
    > I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously. Bellingcat have a significant proven track record [1] and have won significant awards for their reporting, including the Investigative Reporting Award from the European Press Prize [2]. Do you have evidence for your counter-claim that they should not be taken seriously? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Notable_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Notable_cases [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Awards
    - halothane 4y ago
      [flagged]
mannerheim 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed here. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mannerheim 4y ago
    With all due respect, in a discussion about Seymour Hersh's credibility, his soundness of mind should be a valid criticism.
    - dang 4y ago
      What you did was against the rules regardless of who you're talking about. It's not a borderline call. Maybe you don't owe disagreeable elderly journalists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - mannerheim 4y ago
        Is there a respectful way of suggesting a journalist is too senile to be reliable?
        tptacek 4y ago
        Yes. For starters, if you had kept "senility" out of it, and just made your case based on what he'd actually reported, you wouldn't have made it so easy for the thread to devolve into a referendum on "ad hominem" arguments. His age and "soundness of mind" --- which you don't know anything about --- has nothing to do with this situation. It's even worse than that, because really the whole ballgame on a thread like this is dodging what this blogger actually wrote, and instead pivoting to a credibility duel --- Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, and this guy... wrote a blog post? You've lost from the moment you accept that framing. Just read the post and consider what it says! The blogger did the work for you! On the off chance that getting this feedback from someone on "the same side" as your argument is helpful, that is.
tptacek 4y ago
If you're stuck in a time tube and perceive the world as it was in 2005, Hersh is one of the more important journalists in the world. I don't deny that. I only deny that the Jews are attempting to start WW3 in Iran, that Opus Dei runs USSOCOM, that the US faked the UBL raid in Pakistan (and in fact the ISI had UBL for years prior), and that Syria's Sarin attacks on their own people were faked by the US. Oh, also that the US got the Norwegian Navy to put a minesweeper in the Baltic Sea as a diving platform for US divers to blow up a pipeline that wasn't shipping any gas to Germany. If you're still in 2005, I have great news for you: you've got one more amazing season of the Wire ahead of you, and 5 whole seasons of a show called Breaking Bad --- take my word on this, it's going to be amazing. You can skip The Wire S5 though.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dralley 4y ago

I think you have to separate Hersh pre-2010 and Hersh after-2010. He was once one of the greatest journalists in the world, but the last decade he has been putting out poorly-sourced, falsifiable garbage. Watch the interview he gave the other day (mentioned in this article) and tell me you walk away from it with more confidence that he's fully "there" as a journalist. He goes on a tangent about how Ukraine is doomed and Zelenskiy is killing his own people by resisting, even though 90% of the country is in favor of fighting to regain the occupied territory. He also doubles down on the ship being, specifically, the ALTA (and not any other ship), but the ALTA has been sitting in a scrap yard for 6 months.

honkler 4y ago
[flagged]
- joshsyn 4y ago
  [dead]
- pvg 4y ago
  Hersh stopped working within journalistic organizations, with their editors, fact-checkers, second-sourcing, etc - the organizations in which all his previous and more credible and verifiable work was done. That's a concrete fact, not 'tribalistic bias'. There's no basis whatsoever for you to attribute skepticism of recent Hersh to it, it's just namecalling.
  - pphysch 4y ago
    According to Hersh, he still does due diligence with editors and fact checking. He just doesn't have the brand sponsorships anymore.
    - mannerheim 4y ago
      And yet, somehow his work ends up error-laden and full of holes. Funny how that works out.
      - pphysch 4y ago
        That's just not true. A handful of bloggers have nitpicked at it using publicly available information. All of Hersh's big stories received the same initial response of derision, going back to My Lai half a century ago [1]. Hersh, believe him or not, is not relying on publicly available information, but confidential sources. [1] - https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/1626279696827617290 https://mobile.twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/16262796968...
        mannerheim 4y ago
        'Chlorine is just a gas. It's not a chemical warfare weapon. You smell it, you run away.' Sure sounds like the words of somebody who isn't going senile!
    - graeme 4y ago
      There’s a difference between: 1. Convincing an editor to run your ideas under their masthead 2. Paying someone to edit your work, and running your ideas under your own masthead A newspaper is more than a brand. They put their reputation on the line when they publish. (You can make a good argument that many newspapers have trashed their own reputations, but that doesn’t negate the argument. When you self publish, you have no one vouching for you. Furthermore if you don’t like an editor or fact checker you can fire them)
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Except that it’s legacy media who has eviscerated their reputation in the past decade. Eg, CNN has a lower viewership in the “key demo” than large YouTube news channels.
  - jrsj 4y ago
    Even if he wanted to work within those journalistic organizations and everything he said was true, they wouldn’t publish it. There’s really no other option for him at this point.
    - pvg 4y ago
      The fact they didn't want to work with him, after many years of him dropping huge bombshells they published, the literal foundation of his reputation, says more about his later work than than theirs, no? It's strange to claim his inability to find publishers for his non-verifiable work somehow confirms its credibility.
- mturmon 4y ago
  You're jumping to a conclusion here -- sometimes the journalist does change. Plenty of political journalists go off the deep end at some point in their career. (Prof.) Mark Crispin Miller used to write well-researched essays on the culture of TV, now he believes that Sandy Hook was likely staged and that the standard explanation for 9/11 isn't true. Christopher Hitchens made a significant swerve to the right later in his career. Many colleagues and former friends of Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald feel the same way about what they have done.
  - honkler 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - nkozyra 4y ago
      Gross
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Those last two examples indicate you have a tribalistic bias though: Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald changed their politics which you’re implying impacts their credibility because their friends (fellow members of your tribe) said mean things about that. Further, why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility — and even mixed into a paragraph about hoaxes?
    - mturmon 4y ago
      > why is Christopher Hitchens changing his politics relevant to a discussion about journalist credibility...? Because, unfortunately to those who admired him, Christopher Hitchens allowed his disgust for Islamic fundamentalism to lead him to credulously advocate for a war that turned out to be based on a series of lies? Lies that he partly saw through, but that he decided to ignore in service of what for him was the larger good? It's an instructive episode.
      - mturmon 4y ago

eduction 4y ago

I completely agree. He has a Pulitzer Prize, five Polk awards, two national magazine awards. Broke My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and exposed the Israeli nuclear program. He is easily the most accomplished journalist for several generations. That doesn’t automatically mean this story is right but to dismiss him in emotional and inaccurate terms doesn’t speak to a rational, evidence-based interpretation of the facts.

XorNot 4y ago
Seymour Hersh has also gone off the deep end lately. Some current examples[1]: * the Osama bin Laden raid was faked in a conspiracy with Pakistan and he was actually captured in 2006 * much of the US special forces is controlled by secret members of Opus Dei * that the US military flew Iranian terrorists to Nevada for training * the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria was a "false flag" staged by the government of Turkey Being right decades ago doesn't somehow absolve you of having to have verifiable sources and evidence when you go on to make numerous other claims that don't happen and no one can verify. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bi...
- maybelsyrup 4y ago
  We live in a world where the CIA has a heart attack gun [1], a presidential administration faked evidence of WMD to go to war in Iraq, the CDC conducted secret medical torture on black men with syphilis, and the Pentagon sent JFK proposals to justify a war on Cuba by conducting false flag terrorist attacks against American civilians [2]. (JFK rejected them, apparently.) So I read a list like yours, and read you scoffing at the implausibility of any of those things, and I remember just how different we all can be. [1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-heart-attack-gun/2555371072001 https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Yes and you know what all those things have in common? Actual evidence which corresponds to real events, and multiple sources confirming that they happened. What Hersh's suppositions have is a stunning lack of verifiable evidence and observably factually incorrect assertions (as in the case of his articles on Nordstream).

kurthr 4y ago

Well, in the last decade he's kinda blown it with multiple claims in Syria. Statements that are either unbelievable, undocumented and easily could be (like building locations), or basically falsified have really brought down his trust. Even if he's just getting bad information rather than coming from a particular angle, his readers deserve better vetting of the material. At some point it feels like he's being driven by narrative more than facts that's a problem, and hanging out with Bashir Al Assad doesn't help to get the "real" story. Also note that Assad does have a particularly aligned geo-political supporter these days, who's directly involved. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n24/seymour-m.-hersh/whose-sarin https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-hersh/military-to-military https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/06/25/will-get-fooled-seymour-hersh-welt-khan-sheikhoun-chemical-attack/ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/whatever-happened-to-seymour-hersh There's no such thing as a chlorine bomb- "Chlorine is just a gas. It's not a chemical warfare weapon. You smell it, you run away." - Seymore Hersh Tell that to soldiers in WWI.

Mizza 4y ago
Bellingcat is a way for UK/US spies to launder intelligence, a bootleg Wikileaks that won't challenge domestic power structures. I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously.
- ninjagoo 4y ago
  > I wouldn't point to them if I wanted my point to be taken seriously. Bellingcat have a significant proven track record [1] and have won significant awards for their reporting, including the Investigative Reporting Award from the European Press Prize [2]. Do you have evidence for your counter-claim that they should not be taken seriously? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Notable_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Notable_cases [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Awards
  - halothane 4y ago
    [flagged]

mannerheim 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago
Personal attacks and name-calling are not allowed here. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mannerheim 4y ago
  With all due respect, in a discussion about Seymour Hersh's credibility, his soundness of mind should be a valid criticism.
  - dang 4y ago
    What you did was against the rules regardless of who you're talking about. It's not a borderline call. Maybe you don't owe disagreeable elderly journalists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - mannerheim 4y ago
      Is there a respectful way of suggesting a journalist is too senile to be reliable?
      - tptacek 4y ago
        Yes. For starters, if you had kept "senility" out of it, and just made your case based on what he'd actually reported, you wouldn't have made it so easy for the thread to devolve into a referendum on "ad hominem" arguments. His age and "soundness of mind" --- which you don't know anything about --- has nothing to do with this situation. It's even worse than that, because really the whole ballgame on a thread like this is dodging what this blogger actually wrote, and instead pivoting to a credibility duel --- Hersh broke Abu Ghraib, and this guy... wrote a blog post? You've lost from the moment you accept that framing. Just read the post and consider what it says! The blogger did the work for you! On the off chance that getting this feedback from someone on "the same side" as your argument is helpful, that is.

tptacek 4y ago

If you're stuck in a time tube and perceive the world as it was in 2005, Hersh is one of the more important journalists in the world. I don't deny that. I only deny that the Jews are attempting to start WW3 in Iran, that Opus Dei runs USSOCOM, that the US faked the UBL raid in Pakistan (and in fact the ISI had UBL for years prior), and that Syria's Sarin attacks on their own people were faked by the US. Oh, also that the US got the Norwegian Navy to put a minesweeper in the Baltic Sea as a diving platform for US divers to blow up a pipeline that wasn't shipping any gas to Germany. If you're still in 2005, I have great news for you: you've got one more amazing season of the Wire ahead of you, and 5 whole seasons of a show called Breaking Bad --- take my word on this, it's going to be amazing. You can skip The Wire S5 though.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]