Sunday, May 24, 2015

Seymour Hersh: Challenging the Bin Laden story




What the coverage of the Bin Laden story reveals about journalism in the US; plus, as politics thaw, Cuba's media scene.



Since the story of the killing of Osama bin Laden broke four years ago, there have been varying accounts of exactly what happened, but journalists - and also Hollywood directors - have, on the whole, accepted the narrative presented by the Obama administration.

But four years on, one of America's best known investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh, has published a report challenging Washington's version of the story. Hersh's investigations led him to conclude that it was not the CIA that traced Bin Laden to his compound in Abbottabad, but an officer in the Pakistani intelligence service who gave him up. According to Hersh, the Pakistan government had been keeping the al-Qaeda leader prisoner for five years.

The response has been telling. Instead of using Hersh's account as an opportunity to revisit the official story, much of the US media turned its attention to Hersh himself and his methods. Does Sy Hersh deserve the scrutiny he has received? Or is this another case of journalists too close to power to question its narrat

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