Seymour Hersh gave the keynote address at the 3rd Annual Al Jazeera Media Forum in Doha, Qatar on April 1. Excerpt from his speech:
“As the world collapses around us, as leadership collapses, as we’re driven more by the price of oil than the price of integrity, we have a role [as journalists] to play. And to me, that’s what it’s all about. I complain bitterly, I was just talking earlier today, we have so many terrible shortcomings in our profession. We’re very bitchy to each other. We’re competitive. We’re very narrow.
“There is a young journalist here, Dahr Jamail, whose stuff has been very prescient, and I’ve four or five times included the brave accounts of some of his work in my stories and editors, it’s not just at the New Yorker, it’s at the New York Times where I worked very happily for a decade. The first thing you cut out is any mention of anybody else. That’s such a disagreeable aspect of our profession, the competition. Rather than credit a competitor we’ll ignore the story. This is general. You all know what I’m talking about.”
Listen here.
More on the Hersh speech here.