© Getty ImagesA US Air Force B-1 Bomber separates from the boom pod after receiving fuel from an Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker en route to strike chemical weapons targets in Syria.
Perhaps the same self-appointed guardians of rectitude would also have gone through the past writings and sayings of the journalists involved, and found they were insufficiently loyal to the fashionable opinions of the time. It is a form of McCarthyism. And if you scoff at that, you have to ask yourself honestly if you would have recognized Joe McCarthy for what he was in his own time, or stood up to him, as so few actually did? How the junior senator for Wisconsin would have loved Twitter.
What they could not have done, of course, would have been to refute the devastating stories which these great newspapers brought into the daylight, with considerable courage. Because those stories were true. But even so, they might have frightened reporters and editors out of pursuing them. And in that case we would be living now in a darker and less truthful world.
Comment: Hitchens clearly has a lot wrong (his characterization of Putin and Assad, for one), but he gets the crux of the problem. But he should keep in mind that many 'citizen journalists' (Caitlin Johnstone comes to mind) who relentlessly pursue the truth and get it out there and act as a guard against 'consensus realilty'. Hitchens should be aware of the fact that, in today's politically charged climate, he's a dying breed - real journalism, that goes after the story regardless of the consequences to ideology, is hard to come by.
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