Catherine Herridge Keeps Reviving Journalism

Just when you think journalism has gone down the drain forever into the performative sewer, someone revives it with, of all things, facts.

That someone is often Catherine Herridge.

Ms. Herridge is old school to a fare-the-well. Instead of promulgating propaganda masquerading as news, she does actual journalistic work. She acts like a true investigative reporter, obtaining hard-to-find records and presenting them to us without over-editorializing, leaving us to decide what to make of them.

Nevertheless, her work is always timely and relevant. And she protects her sources when threatened, as happened during the Yanping Chen affair, in which the FBI investigated a Chinese-American scientist and former PLA member over possible Chinese military connections. Ms. Herridge was initially fined $14,400 in that one for protecting her sources. Eventually she got that back. She has never revealed her sources.

CBS fired her after she ran in-depth reports on the Hunter Biden laptop, including an early forensic review that verified its authenticity. The network claimed they took the action only as part of normal cutbacks. Hmmm…

Herridge is back now with some interesting, perhaps discomforting, information ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. As usual, this came from hard work digging through documents.

Here is what Herridge reported on X. You will note that she is now an independent journalist after working for Fox and CBS, among others. It is from these independents that we are most likely to discover what the NY Times used to promise: “All the News that’s Fit to Print.”

Several things are interesting here, including possible inadvertent US involvement. Also key is that the “advance team” arrived in late 1998, pushing back the 9/11 timeline considerably. It obviously also calls the 9/11 Commission report into question, not to mention the Saudi connection. (Who sent the “advance team”?) You may remember allegations at the time that the Bush family was covering up for their Saudi friends.

Herridge draws no conclusion about that connection. Back then, we can assume Saudi Arabia was a more primitive country with a variety of groups, including the extremist Wahhabis, vying for control. In some senses, it may have been similar to today’s Iran, obviously in disarray. It could well have then been a mix of forces, not all communicating with each other, some eager to make trouble, others not. If the Saudi government itself was involved, the question becomes how high up that involvement went.

Saudi leader MBS, who was fourteen at the time, was undoubtedly not thrilled to see this on X today. He seems eager to modernize his country, and this would be a step backward. One wonders how President Trump felt. It’s up to him to sort this out, with 9/11 victims’ families naturally pressing for full disclosure on this 25th anniversary. Who would want to be in the president’s shoes? But then, he’s used to it—on this and a lot of other matters.

Keep it up, Ms. Herridge. We need you. We novelist-screenwriters can’t provide what you do. We just make things up.

WELL, MOSTLY

Recently, while researching the sequel to EMET, I have been on a video call with someone somewhere in Iran. For that person’s safety, I can’t be more specific, but I will say they had a more difficult childhood than most of us. When they refused to say “Death to America! Death to Israel!” in school, they ended up in the hospital. It went on from there.