January 27, 2005

Hersh: A Stone, Not a Woodward

Max Boot's column in today's L.A. Times has this to say about Seymour Hersh:

Hersh . . . is the journalistic equivalent of Oliver Stone: a hard-left zealot who subscribes to the old counterculture conceit that a deep, dark conspiracy is running the U.S. government. In the 1960s the boogeyman was the "military- industrial complex." Now it's the "neoconservatives." "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military!" Hersh ranted at UC Berkeley on Oct. 8, 2004.

Boot takes strong exception to Hersh's latest hit story, "The Coming Wars: What the Pentagon Can Now Do in Secrecy," which appears in the New Yorker. His principal complaint: Hersh's imagination, like Oliver Stone's, is better than his journalistic skills. And "all of Hersh's errors run in one direction: toward making the U.S. government look bad."

In a conclusion that seconds the complaints of Thomas Sowell, outlined in the previous post, Boot writes:

That Hersh remains a revered figure in American journalism suggests that the media have yet to recover from the paranoid style of the 1960s.

— Winfield Myers

| Jan. 27, 2005 | 10:23 PM