Why this matters
Journalists play a crucial role in free societies. By muckraking and presenting complex events and issues in clear English, they give the interested citizen a view of the objective truth (which those in power would often like to hide). This is one reason societies without a free press tend to have low levels of trust in their governments and institutions, which ultimately has insidious effects on their ability to function effectively as nations.
Press reporting on the war in Ukraine has been disgraceful, and nowhere more so than its reporting of the Nord Stream attacks. This is not the first time in memory the media establishment has abrogated its responsibilities in favour of peddling its preferred and government-aligned narrative. It reported the received wisdom on the Iraq 'Weapons of Mass Destruction', the ‘Russiagate’ story, and the Covid Natural Origin theory as truth, when none were anything of the sort.
Clearly, newspapers and the journalists who work for them have learned nothing from any of these humiliations. Instead, in the aftermath of the Nord Stream attacks, they were swept away with the idea that Russia was guilty, even as there was obviously not a shred of evidence to support this. Perhaps they had good reason to dislike Russia, given events in Ukraine, but news reporting should be about fact, not emotionally-driven assumptions: wanting something to be true isn’t the same as it being true.
This dismal abrogation of journalistic standards is made even worse by the scale and import of these stories. The Iraq WMDs story was the basis of an illegal invasion which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, massively destabilised the Middle East, increased the power of Iran in the region and damaged Western credibility. Russiagate soured Russo-American relations: it’s possible to draw a straight line from that conspiracy theory to current events in Ukraine, and the increased social media censorship recently exposed in the Twitter Files. Covid was the most lethal pandemic in a century, and knowing its origins is crucial if we are to prevent an even worse outbreak in the future. The economic cost of the Nord Stream sabotage has already been made plain in this collection of articles; however, if it turns out that the United States did that damage by destroying the critical infrastructure of one of its closest allies, as Mr Hersh alleges, we simply must know.
The Nord Stream attacks were hugely damaging; however, pipelines are easier to fix than a journalistic community more interested in political activism and parroting stories spoon-fed through official channels than it is about doing the hard, and sometimes unfriendly, work of reporting the truth.
Read more from The Nord Stream Files:
Part one: A brief history of Nord Stream
Part two: An explosion of misinformation
Part three: The truth bubbles to the surface
