The Hersh publishing collapse
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The Hersh publishing collapse is John Kiriakou's account of the marginalisation of the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, offered as the sharpest available illustration of what has happened to independent journalism in the United States.

The stature

Kiriakou states the credentials before the fall. This is a man who for the last sixty years has been one of the most highly honoured and most highly awarded journalists in America, and who was, in Kiriakou's words, the definition of investigative journalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

And he literally cannot get published anymore.

The award

Kiriakou notes his own connection to the story. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retirees from the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and the United States military, which gives an award every year called the Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence.

They gave the award to Hersh in 2017. At the time, Kiriakou says, Hersh complained that he was under such pressure from the mainstream media in the United States that the only place he could get his pieces published was the London Review of Books. Kiriakou's assessment of that outlet is double-edged: it is great and highly respected, but nobody reads it, and it might have a few thousand subscribers.

Five years later

By the time of Kiriakou's telling, he says, Hersh could not even get himself published in the London Review of Books, and had to take to Substack to publish himself and get the truth out there.

That, Kiriakou concludes, is how bad things have got in the United States.

He adds that Hersh has not changed, the media have. The wider case he makes about that relationship is set out in Wolf Blitzer at CIA headquarters and Bob Woodward's access.

See also

- Sam Adams Award
- Wolf Blitzer at CIA headquarters
- Bob Woodward's CIA headquarters access
- Nord Stream pipeline sabotage
