People can pick their political poison with what I am about to say.
I offer a comment on the habits and behaviors of the American media. One of my friends from high school works for the Washington Post. A few years back, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (one of the really big awards in journalism) writing about Donald Trump. The Washington Post essentially dedicated an entire year of a top reporter's time to trying to prove that Donald Trump was not "generous towards charities". Leading into the Iowa Caucuses, Donald Trump had claimed to have donated generously to charities supporting veterans, and a major American newspaper invested a full year of a reporter's time working to disprove an essentially vague throwaway line by a politician at a campaign event. This friend of mine from high school subsequently ended up being the journalist that the Clinton operatives leaked the Access Hollywood tape to.
Politicians are by their nature narcissists, and among other things, narcissists are defined by needing so desperately to be the center of attention that they have to inject themselves into any story being told in their presence. Hillary Clinton rather famously had to make an event with Edmund Hillary on a trip to Nepal about herself and claimed that her mother had named her after the mountain climber (6 years before he climbed Mt. Everest). And of course, Joe Biden is Joe Biden. "Corn Pop was a bad dude."
As I am periodically struck by the startling lack of curiosity that major American news organizations have about any number of things, I remind myself about how one of my high school friends was paid for an entire year to systematically investigate whether Donald Trump was "generous towards charities" serving veterans. I mean punchline, of course he wasn't.
Any way, I offer this little story to reflect upon any time you sit down to review all of the in depth reporting that The Washington Post did on the Nord Stream sabotage prior to the Seymour Hersh article.
One of my personal favorite non-stories is about the house that Barack Obama moved into when he left the White House. Obama rented a house estimated to be worth between 7 and 8 million dollars. The house is owned by Joe Lockhart, who was the White House Press Secretary during the Lewinsky Scandal in 1998. It turns out that the Obama house is one of seven multimillion dollar homes that Joe Lockhart owned in 2016. I know this because it was stated in a throwaway fashion by a major American newspaper in coverage of the Obamas preparing to leave the White House. Disclosure forms from Lockhart's time working in the White House make clear that he was a relatively normal middle class person on his way into the White House and somehow 18 years later he was worth around $100,000,000. Bill and Hillary Clinton accumulating $250,000,000 gets a bit of public attention, and Jared Kushner's business relations with the Saudis obviously merits attention, but even White House Press Secretaries somehow end up accumulating generational wealth after working in the public sector....presumably through proximity to political power.