People of the Year 2004: Seymour Hersh

No one in politics or the press has done more this year to hold the Bush administration accountable than The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh. It's been thirty-five years since the legendary muckraker shook the nation by exposing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, but Hersh is still going strong. Working on tips from anonymous sources, he documented the torture at Abu Ghraib, revealed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved harsh interrogation techniques, and uncovered secret nuclear-weapons deals in Pakistan.

Do you have to do cloak-and-dagger stuff when you go to meet a source, to protect their identity?

I met a source this morning in a coffee shop in a bookstore. When it comes to the prying eyes of this administration, is there any safer place to be? I mean, it's perfect -- they'd never go into a bookstore.

So you worry about being followed?

No. The administration has better things to worry about than asshole reporters.

In some ways you're like the defense industry -- Bush is really good for your business.

Oh, thanks a lot. I had hoped, if he lost, I could take off and really do something different. Instead, I'm back being a boy reporter. I think we're in for a hard four years.

What do you think of the job the press has done covering the administration and the war?

I can't answer that without committing professional suicide. The press never saw the war for what it was: something that didn't deserve to be done. The reporting on weapons of mass destruction was a shambles. And nobody in the press is covering the exponential growth in the bombing of Iraq. How many sorties are being flown? How much tonnage is being dropped? If the government had to cough up that information, we'd be stunned.

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