51pzeZ9bHBL._SL160_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_SH30_OU01_AA160_A book on my Amazon reserve wish list is Seymour Hersh’s next book on national security, civil liberties, and “fixing journalism.”  I’m reading  My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War (Witness to History) by Professor William Allison first.

The Guardian blog summed up Hersh’s continual critique in a word: Journalists, whether writing for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Times, let alone for Fox News, have to be “outsiders.”

In probably the most laudatory conservative criticism ever (that got laughter out of me), Richard Perle, the former assistant defense secretary, said in 2003 that Hersh was “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.”

Hersh is an outsider and helps other outsiders, like Allison, who spend time in archives. For the history of the reporting of My Lai, in addition to the role the military and several presidents played, take a look at this provocative book that deserved even more attention:This book, published by Johns Hopkins, will receive appropriate amounts of attention from the academy, no doubt, but what about the mainstream media, given its topicality of history as analogy (e.g. Vietnam is analogous to Afghanistan)?

Meanwhile, the right never ceases impress me their success in bringing history as analogy to the mainstream.

My favorite example remains Andrew Sullivan’s publicity about The Bell Curve in the 1990s, though The New Republic publisher Martin Peretz fired him, and then the New York Times then hires him with editor Howell Raines firing him in 2002.  And now he writes for the “quality” Murdoch paper the Sunday Times (of London).