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De media over de Hersh onthullingen:

Balloons and bombs
Eva C. Schweitzer
The major media in the USA ignore the Hersh Report. In our country they subject it to a fact check without checked facts.

His Hershness
The balloon caused a big stir here. While Sleepy Joe had the balloon watched, outraged Americans gathered low on the ground with guns and threatened to shoot down the balloon, which was looming at 20,000 metres, on the farthest horizon. It was like in the movie Don't Look Up, where the asteroid slowly becomes visible. But funnier. Are we already at war with China?

I was going to write about China, but then Sy Hersh happened. The grey eminence of American journalism wrote - on Substack - about the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which, he says, citing an anonymous source, were blown up by a U.S. Navy diving unit with the help of the Norwegians (Seymour Hersh: U.S. government had Nord Stream pipelines attacked).

The fact that Russia supplied Germany with cheap gas has always been a thorn in the side of the US government, even more so now in the war in Ukraine. Since the bang, we have been buying the gas expensively in America. In return, German companies are still not allowed to supply American companies that have government contracts, because, America First! It has always been rumoured that the USA was behind the attack, but Hersh is the first journalist to openly claim this.

Hersh is the most famous investigative journalist in America, unlike Bob Woodward, by the way, who is now only a stenographer, or Ronan Farrow, who is more likely to work off his Oedipus complex. He has uncovered the My Lai massacre - for which he won the Pulitzer Prize - torture at Abu Ghraib, Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme and the intrigues of the neocons in the Pentagon.

New York Times and Washington Post: Nothing.
His pipeline story was based on an anonymous source, but that's not unusual with Hersh, and sources are usually deep in the apparatus. Sometimes he makes mistakes, sure, but that's what happens when you immerse yourself in the subject matter and talk to real people, not just transcribe press statements.

It goes without saying that the White House said, "Our name is Hare, we don't know anything. But one would think that other journalists would now jump on the story. Far from it. At the New York Times, crickets. Nothing at all. This is quite astonishing, since Hersh covered Watergate for the Times. But the Times recently ranted in a magazine article about how Germany should now arm itself as a military power against Russia.

The Washington Post is also silent. The Post had published a lengthy article about the journalist as recently as 2015. At the time, other journalists were upset about a Hersh story according to which Obama's bin Laden was not tracked down by the US, but betrayed by Pakistani intelligence. And that Obama's body was thrown into the sea - why, actually? - was also not true. When you read this today, you can't understand why anyone is upset about it.

Reuters did a "factbox" check. The factbox check was then limited to pointing out on which details Hersh was contradicted by government sources, not really a fact check, especially since the White House denial was already in the quite thorough original story.

The Wall Street Journal was no different. However, the tabloid New York Post, also owned by Murdoch, ran an astonishingly balanced report, as did the even more right-wing Breitbart.com. But left-wing media like Democracy Now and, of course, Al Jazeera also reported.

Sharks did it!
In Germany, however, Hersh is being attacked really bitterly. The German press likes to practice opinionated water-carrying. I don't know what psychological surge is behind this; fear of upsetting big brother? Der Spiegel" stated that a "weakly documented blog post" was now being exploited by Russian propaganda. No kidding, Sherlock!

Of course, Der Spiegel would have been at liberty to investigate the "weakly substantiated" facts itself. Or even better, to have investigated the matter itself in the last few months. But to do so, one would have to have original sources in the USA that one could tap, and not just opinionated meta-analysts who take their information filtered from the New York Times.

The Tagesschau also announced, bravely, bravely, a fact check, which then failed to materialise. Instead, a certain Julian Pawlak from the University of the German Armed Forces in Hamburg was interviewed, who said that he could somehow not imagine the event as described by Hersh.

How was it then, did sharks that strayed into the Baltic Sea bite through the pipeline? Was China behind it? Maybe it was that killer rabbit from Monty Python. And, the Tagesschau was outraged: Critics accuse Hersh of spreading conspiracy narratives. Which critics, Donald Rumsfeld? Henry Kissinger? Judith Miller? Sascha Lobo? That's what one would like to know.

Fact-checking without fact-checking
And do Tagesschau journalists actually know what a fact check is? It is a process in which facts are checked to see whether they can be substantiated or not. It's not a sentiment contest in which anonymous opinion leaders are given a platform. In order to check facts, however, one must actually know the facts and not merely conjecture. In the meantime, the fact checkers seem to me like people who become music critics because they are too untalented to make music.

Of course, for political or pragmatic reasons, you can think it's good that Nord Stream was forced to shut down because of Putin and all that, especially if you're an American - although you shouldn't really be giving oil money to the sheiks in Saudi Arabia. But it's a completely different question whether Hersh's story is true. Otherwise you end up with Palmström saying that what can't be can't be.

We can be glad that the balloon from China didn't appear over Hamburg, otherwise the rabbit-footed press would probably speculate whether the sighting wasn't just imagined. Don't Look Up! And that our mobile phones have built-in spy technology is also just a conspiracy theory.

https://overton-magazin.de/kolumnen/...ne-und-bomben/