Why Substack?

A message for you, the readers, about me and Substack

I’ve been a freelancer for much of my career. In 1969, I broke the story of a unit of American soldiers in Vietnam who had committed a horrific war crime. They were ordered to attack an ordinary peasant village where, as a few officers knew, they would get no opposition—and told to kill on sight. The boys murdered, raped and mutilated for hours, with no enemy to be found. The crime was covered up at the top of the military chain of command for eighteen months—until I uncovered it.

I won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for that work, but getting it before the American public was no easy task. I wasn’t an established journalist working for an established outfit. My first story, published under a barely existent wire service run by a friend of mine, was initially rejected by the editors at Life and Look magazines. When the Washington Post finally published it, they littered it with Pentagon denials and the unthinking skepticism of the rewrite man.

I’ve been told my stories were wrong, invented, outrageous for as long as I can remember—but I’ve never stopped. In 2004, after I published the first stories about the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a Pentagon spokesman responded by calling my journalism “a tapestry of nonsense.” (He also said I was a guy who “threw a lot of crap against the wall” and “expects someone to peel off what’s real.” I won my fifth George Polk Award for that work.)

I’ve put in my time at the major outlets, but was never at home there. More recently, I wouldn’t be welcome anyway. Money, as always, was part of the problem. The Washington Post and my old newspaper, The New York Times (to name just a few), have found themselves in a cycle of dwindling home delivery, newsstand sales, and display advertisements. CNN and its offspring, like MSNBC and Fox News, battle for sensational headlines over investigative journalism. There are still many brilliant journalists at work, but so much of the reporting has to be within guidelines and constraints that did not exist in the years I was turning out daily stories for the Times.

That’s where Substack comes along. Here, I have the kind of freedom I’ve always fought for. I’ve watched writer after writer on this platform as they’ve freed themselves from their publishers’ economic interests, run deep with stories without fear of word counts or column inches, and—most importantly—spoken directly to their readers. And that last point, for me, is the clincher. I’ve never been interested in socializing with pols or cozying up to money types at the self-important cocktail get togethers—the star-fucking parties, I always liked to call them. I’m at my best when I swig cheap bourbon with the servicemen, work over the first-year law firm associates for intel, or swap stories with the junior minister from a country most people can’t name. That’s always been my style. And as it turns out, it’s the ethos of this online community as well.

What you’ll find here is, I hope, a reflection of that freedom. The story you will read today is the truth as I worked for three months to find, with no pressure from a publisher, editors or peers to make it hew to certain lines of thought—or pare it back to assuage their fears. Substack simply means reporting is back . . . unfiltered and unprogrammed—just the way I like it.

Seymour M. Hersh

Washington, DC