
Journalist Seymour Hersh in Perugia, Italy, on April 1, 2009.
- Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.
- Related: Series | Trump Nation, Part 1: How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media
Jeremy Scahill, the Intercept
January 25 2017 | Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts.
Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.
“The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”
Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh is an American investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters. He is writing an alternative history of the war on terror.
Jeremy Scahill is an investigative reporter and war correspondent. He has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere across the globe. Scahill has served as the National Security Correspondent for The Nation Magazine and Democracy Now!.
Related:
Now you can follow Evergreene Digest on Twitter.
Series | Trump Nation, Part 1: How to Deal With the Lies of Donald Trump: Guidelines for the Media, James Fallows, the Atlantic

