Seymour Hersh Reports On A Life In Journalism

Seymour Hersh is a longtime investigative journalist, hailed as a “scoop artist.” He broke the story of the My Lai Massacre in 1968 and reported on the abuse of detainees by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. And these are just two of the many major stories he’s covered in his career.

In May of 2015, Hersh published an article in the London Review of Books that said the Obama administration’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was false. The White House called it “utter nonsense,” and a number of news outlets criticized Hersh’s reporting. The Columbia Journalism Review called the reaction “disgraceful,”, writing that “instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.”

Hersh has always been an iconoclast and he’s never shied away from controversial reporting.

Now, in his new book Reporter: A Memoir, Hersh reports on his own life and his field. His prognosis of the latter isn’t very sunny. “Yes, it’s a mess. And there is no magic bullet, no savior in sight for the serious media,” he writes in the introduction to Reporter.

GUESTS

Seymour Hersh, Author, “Reporter: A Memoir”; former staff writer, The New Yorker and The New York Times; he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative reporting on the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam

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