Seymour Hersh and the Credibility Dilemma.
The shattered legacy of Sy Hersh.
As many of you will, or should, remember, months after the Nord Stream II pipeline explosion, Seymour Hersh released an article which laid responsibility on the doorsteps of America and Norway. A famed journalist with an extensive history exposing some of the worst atrocities by the U.S. military—the My Lai massacre and the revelations of Abu Ghraib most notable among his works—Hersh had stored up a significant amount of credibility throughout his lengthy career. But over the past decade or so, that stockpile of trustworthiness has quickly eroded.
So, is he still worth listening to?
In short, no. Which is a sad answer.
Whether he caught the disease of American diabolism through his early investigative work, or this was always a style of brain rot which ailed him is largely irrelevant. In his earlier works he at least shined an important, and mostly accurate, light on events that would otherwise have remained hidden. If the story is accurate, motives matter little.
Nevertheless, Hersh has a problem. By virtue of his early work, he feels entitled to be taken seriously and unquestionably at face value. He demonstrates this in every interview he has. An example can be found here, but in any recent interview he says something similar: “I took this story to the Washington Post—New York Times—The New Yorker—etc. and no one will run it.”
If you follow Hersh’s logic, they don’t run his stories for fear of challenging the intelligence services and because the art of journalism is dead. In short, there is a conspiracy being perpetrated by the U.S. media and the state. And he probably has a point. There are surely examples of such a conspiracies which gives the accusation some plausibility.
But the truth is that his work, after the exposé on Abu Ghraib, is about as brittle as a Pringle, with even less substance. His writing is unpublishable by any institution that would like to uphold even the veneer of a reputation. His stories increasingly rely on plausibility rather than evidence, unproven conspiracy, and unnamed sources/experts. Where verifiable and substantive facts are presented, they are thoroughly debunked by multiple named experts, who have provable credentials.
This problem appears to arrive throughout his reporting of the Syrian Civil War. At least this is the starkest example of a turn beginning. To spare myself from writing a lengthy takedown of Hersh’s Syrian conspiracy, I will simply link this Bellingcat article which, no doubt, is more complete than anything I could provide. But to summarize the problems Hersh has—aside from the moral issue of running defense for an authoritarian monster—he:
relies on unnamed sources.
references information and reports but provides no citation to prove their existence.
simply ignores mountains of information that run counter to his narrative.
is factually wrong about the details his theories rely on. (Time, distance, logistics, cost, capabilities, etc.)
The only things not verifiably false in his stories seem to be the things not verifiable at all.
That said, journalists are rarely experts on any single topic. It is unreasonable to expect every small detail to hold up to the strictest of scrutiny. This is especially true for a journalist first breaking a story. Some leeway must be allowed, otherwise nothing could ever be published. But the keywords there are “some” and “small.”
So, what should have been a humiliating reality check, after years worth of Syria reporting turned to ash, Hersh had a few options:
accept the L and work harder in the future.
retire.
double down and continue the erosion of his reputation.
This may already be obvious, but he chose option 3.
Learning nothing from the debacle and debunking of his Syria stories, Hersh, in his Nord Stream article, levels a series of unfounded accusations backed by comically disprovable details—my favorite of which being, Secretary General of NATO and former Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, has been working with the American intelligence services since Vietnam. Stoltenberg is now 64, meaning he would have been 16 when the Vietnam War ended. But again, I will spare myself the legwork of doing the debunking (a task I don’t have the technical knowledge for anyway), and instead link you to Oliver Alexander’s wonderfully exhaustive article.
To summarize, nothing is where Hersh claims it was, or operates in the way he says. And these are just the technical flaws in his story. His source—yes, singular source—remains unnamed yet privy to a series of highly secretive conversations. Not that we should expect to hear about it, but this source’s identity would be immediately known to any competent intelligence agency. It’s as simple as asking, “who was in the room for each conversation?” and singling a person out from there. The suspect list would be small from the outset.
However, Hersh’s source is used almost exclusively to craft a narrative, merely adding color instead of being a tool to provide meaningful evidence. This should leave everyone suspicious of his/her veracity, maybe even of this persons’ existence. Despite being a deeply flawed journalist, Hersh is an excellent writer and for more than 50 years has done real investigative work with real people. Crafting a story that sounds plausible to people without relevant expertise is well within his capabilities, with or without a real inside source.
Hersh has authored articles and given interviews since releasing his Nord Stream story. In every one he remains allergic to citation and documentation. The sources remain unnamed. The evidence nonexistent. And each claim more dubious than the last.
The brain rot of American diabolism, which seems to infect Hersh, hasn’t merely led him to be routinely and preposterously wrong on a number or things. His pronouncements on Syria and Ukraine are sinister and swim in war crime denialism.
As Assad gases the people of Syria and kills hundreds of thousands more—with the help of Iran and Russia—Hersh pins the blame on U.S. backed rebel forces.
As Russian soldiers behead Ukrainian POW’s, operate torture chambers, and publicly proclaim their intentions for ethnic cleansing, Hersh, in a recent interview describes Russia as, “not using extreme force”, and routinely calls for the U.S. to end its support for Ukraine.
If anything, Hersh’s greatest accomplishment should be as a case study for journalism students learning how not to conduct themselves. Because, for a man so desperate to maintain legitimacy and respect, he has made it impossible to have either.