Seymour Hersh was in the news a couple of weeks ago with a tendentious claim about the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. The main problem with his reporting is that he only has one unnamed source. This is very similar to Tucker Carlson using one unnamed source for his story that the CIA was behind the JFK assassination.
When I was younger and was on the left, I used to idolize Seymour Hersh. In fact, I was his host for a visit to Concordia University in Montreal i 1976. Here is my article:
In Hersh's 2018 memoir Reporter, he discusses an encounter with Oliver Stone: (page 274)
We did some work, but he was far more interested in expounding on his theory, which later became a movie, that President Kennedy's murder was a CIA conspiracy. We had a game-ending row the next morning when I told him that his idea was off the wall and he said in response that he always knew I was a CIA agent.
The way to understand Hersh is to visualize most of his sources as Michael Scheuer-like individuals. It is not difficult to find such people in the intelligence world: obsessive, frustrated idiot savants who perceive themselves as stymied by the paper pushers, the bureaucrats, the know-nothing ass kissers who don’t have the courage to come out and tell it like it really is. Such people are naturally drawn to a reporter like Hersh, a crusading writer who “gets it,” who sees the world in the same conspiratorial tones they do, where dark, shadowy forces manipulate global events.