In this episode, we ask: Must a story be told? What happens if it isn't? Could we be better off?
Brandon & Stephen are somewhat boggled by the existence of a story that seems out of journalism's primordial past. Not a "man bites dog" story, but an even more ancient piece of news: "dog bites man." We consider a story about how, when dogs attack mail carriers, sometimes whole neighborhoods lose delivery service. It seems that, indeed, everything must be made into news eventually.
But — apparently not everything. From postal pith helmets, we look at a story that didn't show up in the Times, the Post, or even the cable-news networks. It's a story about how the U.S. sabotaged a Russian pipeline providing natural gas to Western Europe. Or maybe it didn't?
What's the saying? "Disinformation is better than no information at all"? (That's not a saying.)
In early February, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a post on Substack that set this whole thing in motion. Hersh has broken huge stories in the past — about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, about torture at Abu Ghraib — so it's just ... weird that the legacy media didn't pick it up, if only to refute it.
That's what we wrestle with in this episode: Hersh's story, why it was ignored, and how we citizens should think about and respond to stories in which we aren't sure about any of it. Turns out, it's an act of faith, and a little something we like to call ...
... brave ignorance.
Put on your pith helmet and some long socks, and let's deliver some answers to that ancient question: How do we know what's safe if we don't even know who bit whom?
JOURNOS is produced by Dave Coates
NOTES
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