If Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour “Sy” Hersh is the closest thing that print journalism has to a superhero, then his origin story can be found in the first few pages of his new memoir, the aptly titled Reporter.

During another late shift, he overheard two cops discussing a robbery suspect who’d just been shot and killed, reportedly while trying to avoid arrest. One police officer, Hersh recalls, said something like, “So the guy tried to run on you?” The second cop replied, “Naw, I told the [N-word] to beat it and then I plugged him.” Hersh later obtained a coroner’s report and found that the suspect had been shot in the back, but when he wanted to write up what looked like a murder committed by Chicago police, his editor again told him no, there was no story. Hersh didn’t push the issue any further, and the matter died there. It left him feeling “full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship,” he writes.

In an interview, Hersh expanded on the metaphor, explaining that he’s a hunter and most people in the journalism world—or otherwise—are meat eaters. “The meat eaters are the guys who receive what the hunters get, but they don’t quite understand the hunters. They don’t really like them,” he says. “I’m always going to have trouble as a meat eater. I’m always going to be the guy throwing dead red full of life on an editor’s desk.”

In a funny way, growing up and working and living in a black neighborhood, I was insulated, so I just don’t remember thinking about color that much. In a lot of ways—at least in my area—we were much less sensitive to color. I understood that I was white and (many of my neighbors) were black, but I didn’t realize there was some sort of institutionalized racism.

And I just saw myself gravitating to writing a lot about racism. That’s why I wrote about Mahalia Jackson. I knew how powerful she was in the black community, and in she couldn’t go anywhere without [selling shows] out, but then I realized she wasn’t all-powerful in the rest of America. And Martin Luther King . . . I mean, how hard was it for him to seduce me? He’d just give me a look and I was his guy. He could read reporters and could tell that I was eager to fall in love.

I love the story you tell in the book about how you got your first journalism job because you lost a poker game.