Obama Takes Body-Blows From the Press

Finally.  And, no, this isn’t from the Wall Street Journal regarding Obamacare.  It is about his war-mongering ways – a subject not touched by the left, and applauded by the right.

This, from Seymour Hersh:

The Obama administration lies systematically, [Hersh] claims, yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles, challenge him.

[Hersh] has said before that the confidence of the US press to challenge the US government collapsed post 9/11, but he is adamant that Obama is worse than Bush.

"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. What's going on [with journalists]?" he asks.

On the “death” of Osama bin Laden:

"Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Seymour Hersh is no light-weight, kooky blogger:

Seymour (Sy) Myron Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."

He first gained worldwide 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. His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.

Hersh beats up on mainstream journalists:

Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.

He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would"… 

Yet, on a couple of points, he seems to leave a little bit hidden:

He says in some ways President George Bush's administration was easier to write about. "The Bush era, I felt it was much easier to be critical than it is [of] Obama. Much more difficult in the Obama era," he said.

At least in this report of the interview, he does not say why this is so. 

"I'll tell you the solution, get rid of 90% of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can't control," he says.

What he is describing is the internet.  What he is offering is the only hope for mainstream news sources to remain solvent, and if they want to regain relevance.

"I would close down the news bureaus of the networks and let's start all over, tabula rasa. 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," he says.

This is what Lew Rockwell and Robert Wenzel, among many others, do – get people mad at them by advancing the non-mainstream narrative.

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

As Lew Rockwell often says (paraphrasing), it is safe to assume that whatever they tell you is a lie.

And he implores journalists to do something about it.

Yes, if they want to survive economically.  Otherwise, good riddance.

(HT EPJ)