Seymour Hersh Quotes

American investigative journalist (born 1937)

Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American investigative journalist and political writer. He first gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In the 1970s, Hersh covered the Watergate scandal for The New York Times, and in 2004, he reported on the U.S. military's torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq for The New Yorker. Hersh has won five George Polk Awards and two National Magazine Awards. He is the author of 11 books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (1983), a biography of Henry Kissinger that won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2013, Hersh disputed the claim that Bashar al-Assad's government used chemical weapons on civilians at Ghouta during the Syrian Civil War, and in 2015, he reported that the U.S. had lied about the events around the killing of Osama bin Laden, both times attracting controversy and criticism from other reporters.
In 2023, he reported that the U.S. had sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, again stirring controversy.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Seymour M. Hersh • Seymour Myron Hersh • Seymour Hersch • S. M. Hersh • S. Hersh • Hersh • Hersh, Seymour Myron

From Wikidata (CC0)

Our reporting should speak for itself. I really do believe that. You know who the good reporters are around the world. There’s people you stop and read even if it’s something you’re not interested in, because they know how to report.

I worked for The New York Times for nine years, under Abe Rosenthal, who was a very conservative guy. I always joke, he used to come into the newsroom in Washington and tap me on the top of my head and say, “How’s my little commie?” The next sentence would be, “What do you have for me?”

I can tell you is that there’s an awful lot of good people in the government, believe it or not—an awful lot of people who don’t like lying. A lot of people in the military who get up to high positions and can’t stand what they had to do to get there and try to stop what they’re doing. A lot of people in the intelligence community that, you know.

It’s amazing how much reporting you can do from America. People retire. Two stars retire very angry that they didn’t make three stars. Three stars retire angry that they didn’t make four. Four stars retire angry that they weren’t [Joint Chiefs of Staff]. There’s always a lot of room to talk to people when they get home.

The republic's in trouble, we lie about everything, lying has become the staple.

I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over... The majors, NBCs, ABCs, they won't like this – just do something different, do something that gets people mad at you, that's what we're supposed to be doing...

The New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more.

Our job is to find out ourselves, our job is not just to say – here's a debate' our job is to go beyond the debate and find out who's right and who's wrong about issues. That doesn't happen enough....

There are other issues... Like killing people, how does [Obama] get away with the drone programme, why aren't we doing more? How does he justify it? What's the intelligence? Why don't we find out how good or bad this policy is?...

What's going on [with journalists]?... Too much of it seems to me is looking for prizes. It's journalism looking for the Pulitzer Prize...

Do you think Obama's been judged by any rational standards? Has Guantanamo closed? Is a war over? Is anyone paying any attention to Iraq? Is he seriously talking about going into Syria? We are not doing so well in the 80 wars we are in right now, what the hell does he want to go into another one for?

I have this sort of heuristic view that journalism, we possibly offer hope because the world is clearly run by total nincompoops more than ever … Not that journalism is always wonderful, it's not, but at least we offer some way out, some integrity.

He [Edward Snowden] changed the whole ball game... But I don't know if it's going to mean anything in the long [run] because the polls I see in America – the president can still say to voters 'al-Qaida, al-Qaida' and the public will vote two to one for this kind of surveillance, which is so idiotic...

Duncan Campbell [the British investigative journalist who broke the Zircon cover-up story], James Bamford [US journalist] and Julian Assange and me and the New Yorker, we've all written the notion there's constant surveillance, but he [Snowden] produced a document and that changed the whole nature of the debate... Chicken-shit editors who wouldn't touch stories like that

It's pathetic, they are more than obsequious, they are afraid to pick on this guy [Obama]... It used to be when you were in a situation when something very dramatic happened, the president and the minions around the president had control of the narrative, you would pretty much know they would do the best they could to tell the story straight. Now that doesn't happen any more. Now they take advantage of something like that and they work out how to re-elect the president...