Lapdogs, redux: How the press tried to discredit Hersh’s bombshell reporting on CIA domestic spying
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Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.
They also revealed to the public for the first time the NSA’s secret programs targeting Americans, including co-opting all the major US telecoms and cable telex companies— AT&T, ITT, Western Union and RCA—in a program “vacuuming” all electronic communications, as well as “Project Minaret,” in which the NSA wiretapped hundreds or perhaps tens of thousands (depending on the source) of antiwar and leftwing American dissidents. Those hearings led briefly to some real reforms and some half-assed reforms in the intelligence community during the Carter years, all of which were undone as soon as Reagan came to power. (I wrote about the history of Hersh’s MH-CHAOS exposé for NSFWCorp here and here.)
That is what effective journalism looks like. But if Hersh’s media peers at the time had their way, none of that would’ve happened. Rather than supporting Hersh, journalists across the spectrum, led by the Washington Post, did everything to discredit and undermine his reporting. “I was reviled,” is how Hersh later put it to UC Davis professor Kathryn Olmsted, author of the excellent “Challenging the Secret Government.”
It was mostly thanks to the CIA director’s own admission in January 1975 that Hersh’s reporting was correct that other journalists backed off, and joined in the adversarial feeding frenzy. Yes: the CIA saved Hersh’s biggest scoop from the lapdog press. Times were strange.
http://pando.com/2015/05/14/lapdogs-redux-how-the-press-tried-to-discredit-seymour-hershs-bombshell-expose-of-the-cias-domestic-spying/
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