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).
Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”