He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts

Hersh denounced news organizations as "crazy town" for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.

"The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous," Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. "They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done," they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: "the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment."