From CBC:
Journalists easily manipulated, says veteran U.S. newsman
Seymour Hersh says bloggers now more effective than mainstream media

Seymour Hersh will kick off the Shaw Festival's fall lecture series on Sunday in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. (Brad Barket/Getty Images)
Groundbreaking U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh contends that journalists have allowed themselves to be manipulated in their coverage of U.S. politics in recent years.

"My profession failed us when it came to understanding what George Bush and Dick Cheney were doing in Iraq," Hersh said Thursday on CBC cultural affairs show Q from CBC's Washington, D.C., studio.

"Generally, we didn't do our job, which was to be skeptical and give them the greatest scrutiny we could, to hold them to the highest possible standards. We didn't do that. We went along with them and became part of the team," said Hersh, who will kick off the Shaw Festival's fall lecture series at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., on Sunday.

And journalists are still being manipulated, he added. "We have a man in office [in the U.S.] who's demonstrated no capacity to get anything done with any success, and we've just given him $700 billion U.S. to ease the world's credit crunch. Of course, we've found out over the past weekend that they're only just figuring out what to do with this money."

It's not a new situation, he said, giving examples from his career as a reporter in the New York Times' Washington bureau and as Washington correspondent for the Associated Press.

"When you have editors who want stories and are willing to take risks, you have a great newspaper," he said. "But most of the people who get promoted [to top editors] fit the corporate model, are malleable and predictable … less interested in stories and more interested in not making waves."

Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin have been telling American voters to ignore what they call the liberal media.

Hersh pointed to a revolution in journalism that's been sparked by the Internet. Bloggers, he noted, have replaced the mainstream news media as cutting-edge news gatherers.

The public began learning about Sarah Palin, he said, "when bloggers in Alaska started flooding the Internet with accounts of some of her doings and the mainstream press picked it up. We have a new phenomenon at just the right time .… We don't know what to make of it … but I assure you, it is the future in terms of journalism."

He also noted that the public's appetite for celebrity gossip has resulted in the blurring lines between news and entertainment. "I don't care what they [reporters] think," he said. "I want to know what they know."

But Hersh, whose coverage of the My Lai massacre and coverup helped end the Vietnam War, believes in the power a single piece of writing can wield.

He also believes it's the duty of journalists to be unbiased in their reporting, and this objectivity shouldn't undermine reporting the truth.

"By 1967, I was convinced that the only objective thing to say about the [Vietnam] war was that it was a disaster," he said. It was corrupting America, it was murdering people."