Pay No Attention to the Story About that Blown-Up Russian Gas Pipeline!

Journos

In this episode, we ask: Must a story be told? What happens if it isn't? Could we be better off?

Brandon & Stephen are somewhat boggled by the existence of a story that seems out of journalism's primordial past. Not a "man bites dog" story, but an even more ancient piece of news: "dog bites man." We consider a story about how, when dogs attack mail carriers, sometimes whole neighborhoods lose delivery service. It seems that, indeed, everything must be made into news eventually.

But — apparently not everything. From postal pith helmets, we look at a story that didn't show up in the Times, the Post, or even the cable-news networks. It's a story about how the U.S. sabotaged a Russian pipeline providing natural gas to Western Europe. Or maybe it didn't?

What's the saying? "Disinformation is better than no information at all"? (That's not a saying.)

In early February, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a post on Substack that set this whole thing in motion. Hersh has broken huge stories in the past — about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, about torture at Abu Ghraib — so it's just ... weird that the legacy media didn't pick it up, if only to refute it.

That's what we wrestle with in this episode: Hersh's story, why it was ignored, and how we citizens should think about and respond to stories in which we aren't sure about any of it. Turns out, it's an act of faith, and a little something we like to call ...

... brave ignorance.

Put on your pith helmet and some long socks, and let's deliver some answers to that ancient question: How do we know what's safe if we don't even know who bit whom?

JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates

NOTES

• Seymour Hersh talks about his journalism philosophy and responds to the controversy over his latest story
• Reuters dutifully relays the government's response to Hersh's story and explains who Hersh is, while the administration digs into denials
• Not surprisingly, Russia thinks Hersh is onto something
• Here's Hersh's 2004 New Yorker story about torture at Abu Ghraib
• Here's Hersh talking Bin Laden on CNN in 2015
• Another journalism veteran puts Hersh into perspective in a 2018 NYT review of Hersh's memoir, "Reporter"
• For the curious, here are some critiques of Hersh's reporting over the years from Slate, Snopes, Vox, and a sort-of one from NYT Magazine
• Hersh's reporting of the last decade is carried by the London Review of Books — controversial in part because the stories are built on only a few, anonymous, sources
• CNS News uses the pipeline story to go after NYT ... and shill a Mediterranean cruise with Rick Santorum!

Clips you heard in this episode:

• Biden's February 2022 press conference where he says he’d take action against Nord Stream if Russia invades Ukraine (C-SPAN)
• A 2022 CNN report on the pipeline explosion
• CNN's Wolf Blitzer interviews Hersh about Abu Ghraib in 2004
• Hersh on CNN in 2013 to talk about the Syria poison gas attacks
• A November 1969 ABC News story on the My Lai massacre
• The February 2023 Democracy Now! interview with Hersh
• Ding and wave sound FX from InspectorJ under a Creative Commons license