The NS Interview: Seymour Hersh

Is it always a journalist's duty to report the truth, even if it may damage innocents?
I'm a total First Amendment Jeffersonian. It's their job to keep it secret and my job to find it out and make it public. But once one gets some information, one doesn't run pell-mell into it. You know, maybe six or seven times in 40 years I've had a story and the president has called
up and said: "If you write this story, American security will be damaged." In every case except one, we wrote the story. And son of a bitch, the Russians didn't launch paratroopers into the foothills of San Francisco the next day.

Are there times when you have a scoop, or a piece of information, but let it go?
You're constantly not publishing everything you know. That's part of the game.

Do you ever worry that your phone is bugged?
Some people I only talk to in their home or their office, but I arrange the calls here. To bug me legally they'd have to get a warrant; once you have something illegally you can't use it very much. If the 9/11 attacks taught us one thing, it's that the agencies collect lots of wonderful stuff they don't share with anybody.