The SZ journalist questioned the reliability of the information about the explosion of the Nord Stream — 2The journalist of the Czech edition Seznam zprávy questioned the reliability of the information contained in the article by Seymour Hersh about the undermining of the Nord Stream — 2.
He reproaches Hersh for using a single anonymous source and finds a "significant error" in his investigation.
Tomáš Pergler (Tomáš Pergler)Less than an hour after Seymour Hersh's article appeared on the website on Wednesday, Russian state media were already referring to it en masse.
The rapid reaction of representatives of this environment, as well as the specific place of publication of the article (it was published not in any authoritative publication, but on the Substack blog platform) make us treat the published information with restraint.
Nevertheless, due to the seriousness of the message and the authority of its author, the legend of American investigative journalism Seymour Hersh, even the most inveterate skeptics were forced to discuss the news that the Nord Stream gas pipelines destroyed the United States last year, and not to attribute this information to the fruits of the fantasies of misinformers.
Probably for the same reason, some prominent Western media, including the British Times, drew attention to the article. Most chose a cautious approach, such as the Reuters news agency, which first mentioned Hersh's article only in connection with the reaction of the White House. However, in the meantime, the article was already being distributed on social networks.
Anyway, the main question is: how reliable is the information presented in the article?
If you take a closer look at the content of Hersh's article and recall some episodes of recent years associated with it, then you come to the conclusion that restraint in evaluation is quite appropriate here.
What is written in the article about the explosions on the Nord StreamSeymour Hersh, citing an unnamed source, wrote that divers of the American Navy in June 2022 laid explosives on pipes connecting the Russian Federation with Germany along the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
According to Seymour Hersh, the operation began to be prepared on the initiative of US President Joe Biden even before the start of Russia's special operation in Ukraine.
The explosives were laid in June 2022 during the NATO BALTOPS 2022 naval exercises in a place that was pre-selected by specialists of the Norwegian navy.Then, according to Seymour Hersh, in September, a Norwegian plane dropped a sonar buoy into the sea, which provided a signal transmission.
Thus, an explosion was later carried out on the orders of President Joe Biden.The White House categorically denied the article, calling it "completely false and pure fiction."
Seymour Hersh, who will turn 86 in April, has received prestigious awards in the past, including the Pulitzer Prize, and is the author of textbook investigative journalism, such as, for example, exposing the mass murder of Vietnamese civilians in Mi Lai by American soldiers in 1968.
However, in the current article, he did not even reach the basic requirements of serious journalism.
First of all, the justification of information about the planning and implementation of an explosion on a gas pipeline does not stand up to criticism. In the extensive material, which has more than 30 thousand characters, Seymour Hersh refers to only one unnamed source. Moreover, its reliability, given the seriousness of the message, is very doubtful.
The author writes about "a source with direct access to the planning of the operation" or about "a source directly aware of the process". However, Seymour Hersh does not specify whether this person, for example, is one of the responsible heads of the presidential administration, special services, the Ministry of Defense or the US armed forces. When Hersh quotes his source in some places, he does not give any specific data in direct speech. Rather, the quotes contain some general, complementary information.
But the basic principle of journalism is to check information in several sources. The name and status of the source is not indicated only in exceptional cases, for example, when it may harm this person or put him at risk. Moreover, it would be necessary to tell in more detail what the source has to do with the information being reported. The editorial Code, which, for example, we are guided by in Seznam Spravy, suggests that the management may require the author of the material to disclose the identity of the source in order to assess his authority in connection with the topic under discussion.
In addition, Seymour Hersh made at least one significant mistake in his material. By coincidence, it concerns the Czech Republic. In the passage dedicated to the events of the second half of 2021, Hersh mentions the speech of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, delivered in Prague. In it, the head of the German government supported the call of French President Emmanuel Macron for a more independent European foreign policy. Seymour Hersh attributed this to the doubts of the White House about how closely Olaf Scholz intends to cooperate with the United States in the period before the start of the Russian special operation in Ukraine. Moreover, the speech of German Chancellor Hersh refers to the period "after the failure in Afghanistan", clearly implying the withdrawal of American and other Western troops from this country in August 2021.
But at that time Olaf Scholz was not yet chancellor and assumed this position only in December of the same year, after the victory of his Social Democrats in the elections. However, most importantly, Olaf Scholz made the aforementioned speech in Prague only a year later — in August 2022, that is, six months after the outbreak of the armed conflict in Ukraine and in a very different international situation.
Doubts are also raised by some other data in the article. Journalist Joe Galvin, who in the non-governmental organization Outlaw Ocean Project analyzes publicly available data on the movement of ships, came to the conclusion that the available data on the routes of Norwegian warships do not correspond to the information in Hersh's article.
However, doubts are raised not only by the material itself, but also by the ambiguous reputation that Seymour Hersh acquired for himself with some questionable things in the past.
He was severely criticized due to an inconsistent approach to sources back in 2015. Then he said that the head of the Al-Qaeda organization* Osama bin Laden was caught not in 2011 by American special forces, but in 2006 by the Pakistanis, who subsequently sold him, according to Hersh, to the United States in exchange for military assistance.
According to the Politico website, initially Seymour Hersh planned to publish that article in the prestigious New Yorker magazine, where he had previously been published regularly, but the editor of the publication rejected the material, citing unconvincing sources. As a result, the article was published in the London Review of Books.
Earlier, for the same reason, the New Yorker rejected another article by Seymour Hersh, in which he accused the administration of President Barack Obama of abusing intelligence information about a chemical attack in Syria against Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
"Seymour Hersh's problem is that he takes everything his confused sources tell him without skepticism, and there is a certain irony in this, given how cynical he is about the statements of officials from the US national security apparatus," the Slate news site wrote in May 2015.
Critics, to whom the Bellingcat investigative association has long belonged, for example, also reproach Seymour Hersh for doubting the poisoning of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal, which occurred in 2018 in the British city of Salisbury, with nerve poison on the orders of the Kremlin.
"If you take Seymour Hersh's latest material seriously and consider him a serious journalist, then I strongly recommend that you reconsider your attitude towards both Hersh and yourself," stated Eliot Higgins, founder and creative director of Bellingcat.
Just like a few years ago, Seymour Hersh's material divided readers into two groups. The first at least doubts his claims, and the second sees in his article a confirmation of the opinion that the main media of the Western world hide an inconvenient truth and play on the side of their governments.
But this time the effect of the controversial material is multiplied by the circumstances of the information war that accompanies the conflict in Ukraine. The Kremlin and its subordinate Russian media found the article very useful. From the moment Seymour Hersh's article appeared on the blog site, Russian leaders have been seeking a reaction and demanding an international investigation.
"This is a very dangerous precedent. If someone has done it once, they can do it again anywhere in the world," said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary of the President of Russia. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Washington would face "consequences."
The article also pours water on the mill of Kremlin supporters in Europe, primarily in Germany, which has significantly suffered from the shutdown of gas supplies via the Nord Stream. The head of the extremely populist Alternative for Germany movement, Tino Britalla, said that Seymour Hersh's allegations should be thoroughly checked, and called for the creation of a parliamentary committee to investigate.
* a terrorist organization banned in the Russian Federation, ed.** the organization is included by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation in the list of media-foreign agents, ed.