Reason contributing editor Michael Young asks whether the New Yorker actually edits Seymour Hersh or just publishes whatever anti-Bush administration pieces he writes. Here's the introduction to Young's detailed piece:
It's become a habit to greet whatever journalist Seymour Hersh writes with reverence. However, after his ludicrous claim last summer that Israel's war in Lebanon was a trial run for an American bombing of Iran—an accusation undermined by postwar narratives showing the confused way Israel and the United States responded to the conflict—my doubts hardened. In his latest New Yorker piece, Hersh maintains he has unearthed more dirt on the Bush administration: The U.S. is involved in containing Iran by directly or indirectly "bolstering Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda."
The broad tropes of Hersh's arguments are correct. The U.S. has indeed abandoned the neoconservative approach to the Middle East (which Hersh so loathed), to return to political "realism" based on imposing a balance-of-power. Much like the U.S. did during the 1980s when it supported Iraq in its war against Iran, the Bush administration is today using Sunnis against Shiites (though in Iraq it is mainly using Shiites against Sunnis). The policy is risky, fiddling with sectarianism may ultimately backfire, but the problem with Hersh is that he offers little hard evidence for many of his controversial assertions. In fact his discussion of Lebanon in particular and his broader charge that the administration is engaging in clandestine activities without proper legislative approval are ill-informed or partial. The New Yorker has signed off on a piece shoddily constructed, often tendentious, and driven almost entirely by Hersh's sources (most of the more significant ones left unnamed), rather than his own independent confirmation of the details.
This further demonstrates why we should generally ignore writers who rely on anonymous sources.
It's a shame. I have historically enjoyed the New Yorker for both its cartoons and its exhaustively researched articles. This despite the fact that I recognized a strong slant to the left that seemed particularly puzzling after 9/11, given that New York remains directly in the cross-hairs for jihadists around the world.
Yet I have always trusted the New Yorker to provide factually reliable content, if nothing else. Now that trust is slipping, thanks to Seymour Hersh.
I'd like to Seeless Hersh. And more fact checking, please.
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