Last year, I noted that nothing in the world turns a bunch of “hard-boiled”, skeptical journalists into uncritical fanboys and giggly fangirls faster than a bit of attention from one of the superstars of their own field.
And so a crowd of the Twin Cities’ finest “journalists” suspended all judgment and skepticism last year when Seymour Hersh claimed that Dick Cheney was running a covert hypersecret assassination squad, “Joint Special Operations Command”; none of them could apparently be bothered to check that JSOC had existed for thirty years, and has founded by Jimmy Carter, whose vice president Walter Mondale was sitting in the room with them, lapping up Hersh’s very presence.
It’d be easy to jump from that to “the media just doesn’t fact-check liberals”.
And unlike a lot of easy jumps, Mark Hemingway notes it’s pretty much correct.
Hemingway remembers the Hersh bit, too…:
In March of last year, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh dropped a bombshell that a “covert executive assassination ring” had been run out of Vice President Cheney’s office.
Of course, Hersh has long had a “loose relationship with literal truth,” according to a 2005 article by Chris Suellentrop in New York Magazine. Columbia Journalism Review once offered this pointed critique of one of his books: “Hersh’s attributions generally fall short of normal journalistic yardsticks. More important, many of his conclusions are weakly substantiated by his research and highly questionable.”
Despite Hersh’s unreliability, his suggestion Cheney was assassinating people at will was dutifully parroted by the activist Left and receptive members of the media.
(Note to Mr. Hersh, his people, and his legions of media fanboys; where is that book?)
This week President Obama publicly ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen, Muslim Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike Hersh’s scurrilous charge, this presidential directive is a matter of record — not a wild rumor.
Make no mistake: al-Awlaki is a bad guy. He’s been definitively linked to the 9/11 hijackers, and more recently the recent Fort Hood massacre, not to mention the failed underwear bombing plot this past Christmas.
But he’s also a U.S. citizen, and thus entitled to basic constitutional protections. So where are the denunciations of Obama’s extraordinary decision from those who spent eight years decrying Bush and Cheney’s wartime expansion of executive power?
Denunciations?
The “journalists” are all busy on their blackberries trying to get tickets to the Helen Thomas swimsuit shoot.
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