NRO disses Hersh

Andrew C. McCarthy, in the National Review Online, writes a very scathing review of Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command (previously discussed here). McCarthy not only does not like the book, but also shows an extreme dislike for Hersh himself:

By any truly objective standard, Hersh is a terrible reporter. Real reporting plays it straight and gets it right, and the reader simply can't trust him to do either. Hersh is a hard-left ideologue who disdains facts that collide with his dark theories. His methodology, moreover, is a joke. As has been ably recounted by National Review's John J. Miller and others, Hersh's most important sources are anonymous and impossible to verify, while the few sources he does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven. His journalistic practices have been decried by his former New York Times editor, A. M. Rosenthal, and embarrassingly laid bare by his own admissions, in court testimony, about concocting elaborate deceptions to pry out dubious information.

It is, of course, the nature of his research that makes Hersh's sources require to not be identified. The information that Hersh obtains comes with the condition that he cannot reveal where he got it. Hersh is not dealing with people with regular jobs--these are the people at the centre of the United States' intelligence and defence establishments, with access to the most well-kept secrets in Washington. Nevertheless, McCarthy finds something sinister in Hersh's respect for the privacy of his sources:

[A]s long as they were the only game in town, the mainstream media could present Hersh as a respectable raconteur instead of a hyper- partisan. In fact, at The New Yorker, they still think they can: Chain of Command begins with a cloying introduction by Hersh's current editor, David Remnick, who burnishes the legend, elides any hint of the innumerable gaffes, and conveniently explains that, of course, Hersh can't be expected to name his sources, but you can bet the ranch on their credibility because, after all, this is The New Yorker we're talking about.

The National Review is, of course, the most unwavering of the Bush-supporting magazines, and it could not be expected to like a book like Chain of Command, but this review seems to me a little more harsh than needed.