Journalism and helicopter blades

It is hard to believe in a world where 40 some percent of Americans support stupid Old Mac and the perfectly inane Alaskan beauty queen that journalism still takes place. After all, we're used the the "best political team on television": CNN's idiot Wolf Blitzer (was he one of Santa's reindeer?) and the great gurgling comb-over Gergen, and what's the dumb-ass Bush czar of something's name? I can't recall. But, they're the best. Ask them.

And then there's Seymour Hersch, always around, writing in places that my conspiracy theorist friends claim no longer exists. While it's true that most Americans, certainly those screaming insults at Obama at Old Mac's rallies, have never heard of much less read the New Yorker, Hersch is still writing. He's there for the seventeen Americans who still remember how to and actually want to read. Bless him. But like Nader, Chomsky and Moyers, Hersch is seventy-something. After them, what? Wolf and the best team in America? Or VP Sarah? (Does she have a kid named Wolf?)

Here's an excerpt from a recent portrait of Hersch:

"In 1970, after his My Lai story, he addressed an anti-war rally and, on the spur of the moment, asked a veteran to come up and tell the crowd what some soldiers would do on their way home after a day spent moving their wounded boys. With little prompting, the traumatised vet described how they would buzz farmers with their helicopter blades, sometimes decapitating them; they would then clean up the helicopter before they landed back at base. 'That's what war is like,' he says. 'But how do you write about that? How do you tell the American people that?' Still, better to attempt to tell people than to stay feebly silent. What really gets Hersh going - he seems genuinely bewildered by it - is the complicit meekness, the virtual collapse, in fact, of the American press since 9/11. In particular, he disdains its failure to question the 'evidence' surrounding Saddam's so-called weapons of mass destruction. 'When I see the New York Times now, it's so shocking to me. I joined the Times in 1972, and I came with the mark of Cain on me because I was clearly against the war. But my editor, Abe Rosenthal, he hired me because he liked stories. He used to come to the Washington bureau and almost literally pat me on the head and say: "How is my little Commie today? What do you have for me?" Somehow, now, reporters aren't able to get stories in. It was stunning to me how many good, rational people - people I respect - supported going into war in Iraq. And it was stunning to me how many people thought you could go to war against an idea.'"

The article, published in the Guardian, is worth your time. Read it here.