"One night, when Hersh was on duty at police headquarters, he overheard two cops in the parking lot discussing a robbery suspect who’d been shot dead. “So the guy tried to run on you?” one of the cops asked. “Naw,” said the other, “I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.” Leaving the scene undetected, Hersh called an editor at City News and told him what he’d heard. The editor urged him to ignore it; it would be his word against theirs, and the cops would accuse him of lying. Hersh decided to wait a few days and ask for the coroner’s report; it showed that the man had been shot in the back. With a feeling of unease, Hersh let the story drop. It was, he recalls in Reporter, a shameful example of a practice he would witness time and again throughout his career: self-censorship..."
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Pulitzer Prize winnersNon-fiction authors from the United StatesPolitical authors from the United StatesInvestigative journalistsJournalists from Chicago
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Seymour Hersh
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