We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, May 6, 2016

When Liberals Run Out of Patience: the Impolite Exile of Seymour Hersh

Click here to access article by Dave Wagner from CounterPunch

Wagner tells us how Seymour Hersh, the great investigative reporter who is best known for his exposé of the My Lai massacre and other reports that told the true story of events that our media directors didn't want covered, put together the real story of the execution of Bin Laden and his subsequent banishment from American corporate media. I guess it is one thing to uncover the hidden dirty secrets of the Empire and allow them to be published by one or two media companies, but it is not permitted to expose the lies of Empire propagandists.
Seymour Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden a pocket-size collection of stories written for the London Review and printed during the second Obama administration arrives at an awkward moment for the expatriate journalist who not so long ago was esteemed as the finest investigative reporter in the United States. Hersh now publishes abroad because his talent, though undiminished, no longer fits into the publication plans of the nation’s newspaper and magazine publishers. He has, it appears, failed to adapt to the times. His revelations about deceit and brute force in the conduct of foreign affairs that delighted his editors when he raised a torch over Dick Cheney lost its shine when he reported on President’s Obama’s not-so-different Cold War liberalism.

The moment of Hersh’s fall from grace can be pinpointed to a meeting in the office of New Yorker editor David Remnick in 2011.
I had a good laugh at the sentence "Hersh now publishes abroad because his talent, though undiminished, no longer fits into the publication plans of the nation’s newspaper and magazine publishers." Maybe Wagner wrote this with a deliberate comic or satirical effect, but this way of describing what happened is an extremely obscure way of hiding the truth which is in direct contradiction to what Hersh's investigative work as been about.