American Dispatches

Robert Parry

Description

Covering five decades of hard-hitting investigative journalism, this reader is an essential history for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of contemporary American politics.
Often going against the grain of Washington’s so-called conventional wisdom, Robert Parry covered the most consequential issues facing the country during his five decades as a journalist – from the Vietnam War to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War to Russiagate, stories that shaped the course of contemporary American history. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and the recipient of numerous awards – including the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984, I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence in 2015, and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2017 – Parry earned a reputation as a tenacious reporter committed to telling the truth without fear or favor.
This compilation of Parry’s writings traces his development from a student activist to a beat reporter to an investigative journalist and historian, shedding light on how he came to believe that the Washington press corps had lost its way and that building independent media is essential to save the republic. More than a simple collection of articles by an iconoclastic journalist, however, this volume is an illuminating history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – a troubling recent past that Parry meticulously chronicles through in-depth research and compelling storytelling.
What will come into focus as the reader turns these pages is an at times shocking level of corruption and wrongdoing at the highest levels of government, enabled by a steady deterioration of the U.S. media’s commitment to providing an honest accounting of the events shaping our world. The reader, perhaps, will come to the same conclusions that Robert Parry did: that the media has become a threat to democracy and one of the most important tasks that exists today is to build a new infrastructure for conveying information – one that is honest, independent, and incorruptible.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Obama
• Trump
• Politics
• Journalism
• History
• War
• Joe Biden
• Barack Obama
• Carter
• Bush
• Ronald Reagan
• Clinton
• Media
• Guimbarde (instrument)

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 21 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663238955
• Langue: English

Extrait

AMERICAN DISPATCHES
A ROBERT PARRY READER WITH A FOREWORD BY DIANE DUSTON; EDITED AND WITH AN AFTERWORD BY NAT PARRY
ROBERT PARRY


AMERICAN DISPATCHES A ROBERT PARRY READER WITH A FOREWORD BY DIANE DUSTON; EDITED AND WITH AN AFTERWORD BY NAT PARRY
 
Copyright © 2022 Nathaniel Parry.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
 
 
iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3896-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-3895-5 (e)
 
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 07/13/2022
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
PART I
THE MOB AND THE BLOB
May Day (May 1971)
Gun Bounty Program Has Problems, Hopes (Dec. 8, 1974)
Rhode Islander Says CIA Opened His Mail (July 23, 1975)
Top Democrat Discusses Busing (Oct. 24, 1975)
Officials Say Reputed Crime Boss in New England Still Runs Things (Jan. 7, 1976)
Patriarca Claims Indifference to Finding (Nov. 18, 1976)
RI’s Governor Suggests Bevilacqua Quit Supreme Court Seat Pending New Inquest (Feb. 2, 1977)
Indicted Korean Said Ready to Go on Stand (Dec. 15, 1977)
Growth of Political Action Arm Giving Worries Common Cause, Some Leaders (Jan. 11, 1979)
Has Carter Kept the Promise? (Sept. 12, 1980)
El Salvador Feud: Carter People Accuse Reagan Advisers of Contributing to Unrest (Dec. 13, 1980)
Kin of Women Victims Blast Administration (March 20, 1981)
Military Bias Developing (May 27, 1981)
Reagan Protests Becoming Routine (April 18, 1982)
CIA Told to Curb Nicaraguan Rebels (July 18, 1983)
CIA Linked to Nicaraguan Port Blast (April 18, 1984)
Comics Bedevil Sandinistas (June 30, 1984)
Nicaraguan Rebels Said to Get Subversion Manual From CIA (Oct. 15, 1984)
Support of Contras Was Given (June 10, 1985)
Reagan Reportedly OKd Secret Contra Aid (Oct. 8, 1985)
Contras Funded By Cocaine Trafficking (Dec. 21, 1985)
Reagan Upbeat on Contras (March 18, 1986)
U.S. Aided Contras During Congress’ Ban (June 10, 1986)
Reagan’s Shadow CIA (Nov. 24, 1986)
How the CIA Went Wrong (March 2, 1987)
Guns for Drugs? (May 23, 1988)
Reagan’s Pro-Contra Propaganda Machine (Sept. 4, 1988)
The Use of Starvation as a Tool of Democracy (March 25, 1990)
Questions About CIA Nominee go Beyond Gates’ Iran-Contra Role (June 12, 1991)
The Looking-Glass ‘Surprise’ (Dec. 6, 1992)
Fooling America (March 28, 1993)
Boring Details (July/August 1993)
The Hunters (July/August 1994)
The Rise of the Right-Wing Media Machine (March 1, 1995)
PART II
TOWARDS A NEW NEWS MEDIA
October Surprise X-Files (1995-96)
‘Project X’ & School of Assassins (Oct. 14, 1996)
Contra-Crack Story Assailed (Oct. 28, 1996)
CIA’s Perception Management (Dec. 9, 1996)
Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Cover-up (June 16, 1997)
Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Hooking George Bush (July 28, 1997)
CIA Death Lists & Guatemala’s ‘Killing Fields’ (July 14, 1997)
CIA at 50, Lost in the ‘Politicization’ Swamp (Sept. 29, 1997)
Princess Diana’s Death & the Media Monster (Sept. 29, 1997)
GOP & KAL-007: ‘The Key Is to Lie First’ (May 28, 1998)
Russia’s Crash Sounds Clinton Alarm (March 11, 1999)
Al Gore v. the Media (Feb. 1, 2000)
Gore’s Florida ‘Victory’ (Nov. 22, 2000)
W’s Triumph of the Will (Nov. 27, 2000)
A Dark Cloud (Dec. 10, 2000)
PART III
TURNING POINTS
Behind Colin Powell’s Legend (Dec. 2000)
Bush’s ‘Crusade’ (Sept. 25, 2001)
The What-If’s of Sept. 11 (Oct. 18, 2001)
So Bush Did Steal the White House (Nov. 22, 2001)
Missed Opportunities of Sept. 11 (Jan. 13, 2002)
Deeper Into the Big Muddy (Oct. 27, 2002)
Missing U.S.-Iraq History (Feb. 27, 2003)
Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down (March 30, 2003)
Bush’s Alderaan (April 8, 2003)
Bush’s Tet (April 9, 2004)
Bush’s ‘Death Squads’ (Jan. 11, 2005)
Bush & Media: Normalizing the Abnormal (Sept. 21, 2005)
One Percent Madness (June 27, 2006)
The Hariri Mirage Returns (June 16, 2006)
Gary Webb’s Enduring Legacy (Dec. 11, 2007)
The Logic of Obama-mania (Jan. 8, 2008)
Obama’s Dubious Praise for Reagan (Jan. 19, 2008)
Historical Mystery of Bush’s Presidency (Jan. 20, 2009)
How the War Hawks Caged Obama (Nov. 30, 2009)
Haiti and America’s Historic Debt (Jan.13, 2010)
Journalists Are All Julian Assange (Dec. 16, 2010)
The Coming War over the Constitution (Dec. 30, 2010)
Through the US Media Lens Darkly (March 18, 2011)
The Neocons Regroup on Libyan War (March 25, 2011)
Ending the Iraq Catastrophe (Oct. 21, 2011)
On Libya, Now They Tell Us (Sept. 15, 2011)
Profiting Off Nixon’s Vietnam ‘Treason’ (March 4, 2012)
The Neocons and 9/11 (Sept. 11, 2012)
Hollywood’s Dangerous Afghan Illusion (April 7, 2013)
A Dodgy Dossier on Syrian War (Aug. 30, 2013)
Fixing Intel Around the Syria Policy (Nov. 14, 2013)
How US Pressure Bends UN Agencies (Oct. 16, 2013)
Neocons and the Ukraine Coup (Feb. 23, 2014)
PART IV
NARRATIVE CONTROL
Thomas Jefferson: America’s Founding Sociopath (July 4, 2014)
The Whys Behind the Ukraine Crisis (Sept. 3, 2014)
Endless War and the Victory of ‘Perception Management’ (Dec. 30, 2014)
Lynching and the Jeff Davis Highway (Feb. 12, 2015)
Democrats Are Now the Aggressive War Party (June 8, 2016)
The Democrats’ Joe McCarthy Moment (Oct. 19, 2016)
Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt (Nov. 27, 2016)
US Report Still Lacks Proof on Russia ‘Hack’ (Jan. 7, 2017)
The Sleazy Origins of Russiagate (March 29, 2017)
Russiagate Breeds ‘Establishment McCarthyism’ (Oct. 26, 2017)
A Final Word on the State of American Journalism (Dec. 31, 2017)
 
Afterword: In the Spirit of Robert Parry
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Endnotes
FOREWORD
I met Robert Parry in 1982 when I was transferred to the Washington bureau of The Associated Press. He had already gained a reputation within the AP as a relentless investigative journalist who ruffled the feathers of people in power. At the time, he was digging deeply and seriously into misstatements being made by President Ronald Reagan who had been in office a little over a year.
Bob was on the Special Assignments team and tasked with generating his own stories, but sometimes he would be called upon to cover breaking news. So much so, that he jokingly called his Reagan investigation his hobby.
That “hobby” would later become the Iran-Contra scandal, but Bob didn’t know it at the time. He was just following the leads. While on that trail, he discovered that Lt. Col. Oliver North was running an illegal network from the White House to support the Nicaraguan Contras with profits from arms sales to Iran. He was the first to report on North, but in doing so, he was plowing ground that neither The Associated Press nor any other mainstream news organization had been down before.
“My job was to get the story, so I went out to get the story,” Bob said in a television interview. “The more obstacles they put in my way, the more I got determined to get it. But you pay prices. In the real world, you don’t always get the story as easily as you would like to.”
Bob knew that those who wrote stories that the White House didn’t want written ran the risk of having their careers seriously damaged and possibly ended, but it was a risk he felt compelled to take.
He was the best reporter I had ever met. I’d been a professional journalist myself since joining the Toledo Blade in 1971. In 1976, I was hired by the AP in Columbus, OH, became news editor there and was sent to the Raleigh, NC, bureau before being transferred to Washington. I had met and worked alongside plenty of accomplished newsmen and women.
I never partnered with Bob on a story, but I did become his life partner when we married in 1987. He was a wonderful husband, a loving father to his four children, and a fun-loving grandfather to six. He never stopped being a determined journalist, but he always had time for us. He was light-hearted and playful with the family. He entertained his children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews with a silly, smart-mouthed, clueless hand-puppet named Kanga that the rest of us joked was his alter-ego. These connections kept him grounded as he pursued some of the toughest stories of his time.
The way Bob employed his craft met resistance within the mainstream news organizations that employed him. To be first with information that exposes misdeeds by powerful people makes those who run the large news organizations uncomfortable. What if the information is wrong? What if the powerful people that engaged in wrongdoing are friends with the owners of the media organization? Or, in the case of Bob’s reporting on Oliver North, what if the bureau chief supervising the stories is also meeting with Nort