INTERVIEW: Seymour Hersh on how the media should cover Trump
In a rare interview, the legendary reporter talks about the crisis of journalism, the secret of real reporting, and Trump
The investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a legend. He also rarely grants interviews. But this week he spoke to us.
In December, Netflix released Cover-Up, a documentary directed by Academy Award winner Laura Poitras and Emmy Award winner Mark Obenhaus, which focuses on the legendary career of the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. Hersh, now 88 and still hard at work breaking stories — now on his Substack newsletter (the motto: “It’s worse than you think”) — has made profound contributions to the public good through his reporting, which helped expose major government and military scandals, most famously the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. He published some forty articles on the Watergate scandal while working for The New York Times in the early 1970s that helped shift the focus of the investigation to the cover-up itself; exposed an immense, illegal CIA campaign to spy on anti-war activists; and was a relentless critic of Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney, among others.
Time and again, Hersh fearlessly challenged authority, cultivated his own sources instead of relying on official briefings, and gained the trust of young officers rather than forging cozy relationships with those in charge. Cover-Up, like his 2018 book Reporter: A Memoir, chronicles his journey from Chicago’s South Side, where his father ran a dry cleaner, to becoming one of journalism’s all-time greats.
Hersh doesn’t often talk to reporters himself, but in a wide-ranging phone interview with The Ink this week, he weighed in on Trump and our country’s “existential crisis,” the current state of the media, and the basic, often forgotten secret of good reporting.
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What’s your take on the newspaper whose motto was “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington Post, now owned by Jeff Bezos?
The Grahams [the family that owned the Post until 2013] destroyed the paper for money. They sold it to a guy they had every reason to think would do to it what he has. Even good guys like Marty Baron [who retired as the Post’s executive editor in 2021] kowtowed at the beginning, and he was better than that.
And on the problems facing the media industry writ large, your thoughts?