Media (r)Evolution: Investigative Reporter Robert Parry
Posted on 29. Dec, 2009 by Jessica Newman in Culture
Robert Parry is a career investigative journalist who is most famous for covering and breaking the news of the Iran-Contra Scandal in the 1980s, for which he won the George Polk Award, while working for the Associated Press and Newsweek. After he was ousted from Newsweek by the editors, who wanted the Iran-Contra Scandal to simply go away, he went on to work at other publications and teach a graduate journalism course at New York University. Since then, he’s started and currently edits ConsortiumNews.com, a non-profit, reader-supported investigative news web site dedicated to independent journalism. Parry is also the author of a number of books, among them “Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’” and “Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.”
Jessica Newman: One of the things you’re most famous for is breaking wide open the Iran-Contra scandal while working for Associated Press and Newsweek magazine. Do you think you could see this type of investigative journalism coming out of these mainstream news organizations today? Why or why not?
Robert Parry: There are still many fine journalists at mainstream news outlets, and I believe they genuinely want to do the job right. However, many pressures now exist that have distorted the news product. The Right’s heavy investment in media and in anti-journalism attack groups has had a powerful impact, though most mainstream journalists try to deny this. The Right’s clout was amplified by the American Left’s retreat from media over the past three decades.
Actually, in the early-to-mid 1970s, the Left had a media advantage over the Right, but then closed down or sold off key media assets, from shuttering Ramparts to selling the New Republic to neocon Marty Peretz. Much of what the Left kept was located in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away and three hours behind the East Coast news centers. Simultaneously, the Right began committing millions and then billions of dollars to a media infrastructure focused on Washington. Over time, that asymmetry had a telling effect. To keep careers, mainstream journalists saw little choice but to tilt right. Those who didn’t — regardless of how good their journalism was — found themselves constantly under attack and marginalized.
So that makes doing the kind of difficult journalism that many reporters were doing the 1970s and that we tried to continue in the 1980s, around the Iran-Contra scandal, that much harder and therefore less likely to undertake. The consequences to the United States, I would argue, have been grave. The watchdog role of the American news media was transformed into a lapdog role except, of course, on trivial matters like a politician’s sex life. There were few mainstream journalists willing to challenge the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney when they were marching the country off to war after 9/11.
JN: How has your career as an investigative journalist changed over the last 20 years? Do you find it harder to support your line of work? Is there less of an outlet/audience for your type of reporting?
RP: No question it is much harder. In the 1980s, I was working at the AP and then Newsweek. My income was never that high; but the pay was regular, and there were benefits like health insurance. After I lost out on the Iran-Contra battles inside Newsweek and left in 1990 (I was insisting that a cover-up was underway, but the top editors wanted the issue to simply go away), I wrote a couple of books and did some contract work for Frontline. But — in the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky — the space for serious journalism was rapidly closing.
That’s why I founded ConsortiumNews.com in 1995, looking for a way to apply the emerging Internet technology with old-fashioned serious journalism. But I was never able to persuade large foundations or rich individuals to provide the support necessary. When we ran out of money in early 2000, I took an editing job at Bloomberg News so I could pay off the bills. I kept the web site going on a part-time basis, but sadly we didn’t have the impact that we could have had in Campaign 2000 or after the 9/11 attacks. I’ve kept ConsortiumNews.com afloat almost entirely with small donations from readers.
JN: This is broad, and I apologize ahead of time: What do you see as the biggest problem with the mainstream media today? What steps should our country and we, as journalists, be taking to rectify this?
RP: The biggest problem is that Americans, especially those on the Left, don’t understand the necessity of supporting journalism. Perhaps because of the quality journalism of the 1970s — Watergate, Pentagon Papers, etc. — thoughtful Americans, including many liberals, concluded that mainstream journalists would do the heavy lifting on providing accurate information. That freed them up to focus their attentions elsewhere.
When the Right began its massive investment in media, there was disbelief among liberals on the need to counter the propaganda machine. By the time, liberals recognized the danger from Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc., it was regarded as too hard to build the kind of truthful independent media that was necessary to counter the propaganda and the lies.
So the American Left mostly stayed in the stands, shouting down at the mainstream press (and politicians) to do better. The Left remained spectators to the nasty contact sport that was playing out on the field of information.
The only way that dynamic can be changed is for the American Left (especially wealthy liberals) to get off the sidelines and into the game. Well-meaning people of means must invest in building a strong independent media that’s determined to do the work right. In that, I think the Internet does provide an important opening. Money, however, is the key.
JN: ConsortiumNews.com is a non-profit, reader-supported news organization. Is this a realistic and sustainable model for future media outlets in the long run? Why or why not?
RP: I’m not sure there is a business model for responsible journalism that works well. The old approach of family newspapers or TV networks that saw news as a civic duty is dying. Under economic strain, newspapers are closing. Others are publicly traded and thus under pressure from Wall Street for high profits. Networks see news as a revenue stream. Regarding the Internet, advertising remains a problem. You also can’t charge for access because very few people would sign up. So, soliciting contributions — while annoying — may be the only feasible approach, at least at this time. Whether ConsortiumNews.com can survive is an open question.
Thanks to Jessica for interviewing Robert Parry who is an authority on how journalism is failing to protect democracy by not acting – or not being allowed to act – as the fourth estate whose journalists are too often blocked from speaking truth to power.
Parry’s 2004 Book: SECRECY and PRIVELAGE delivered a powerful message that summarized the case for government corruption with fact-based clarity.
By the 2000 Bush/Gore election, journalists were sufficiently intimidated by the right as “liberal media” that they were afraid not to bend in the direction of their consolidated and conservative owners.
One egregious example (page 318) is when Media critic for the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz ridiculed as “conspiracy theorists” those who thought Gore had won the 2000 election. The conservative-backed intimidation Kurtz’s accusation worked so well that liberals who dare dissent to protest a government lie have since been effectively dismissed as “conspiracy theorists”.
Parry spends a lot of time exploring the unbelievable events of 9/11 and how the media controlled the message. But in one exceptional instance, Bush claimed he saw the first plane hit the tower on a TV inside the school. But a subsequent Wall Street Journal article established that the school’s TV had been unplugged. “Plus, there was no footage shown of the first plane hitting the tower until late on the night of September 11th.” In nearly every case, Bush’s “brazen pattern of deception” had FOX News and conservative outlets protecting his flanks against dissidents and those un-patriotic “conspiracy theorists”.
On page 353, Parry writes: “This media imbalance has turned the concept of an independent watchdog press into a “broken toy” of the American political process. Another “broken toy” is the tradition of objective analysis in the US intelligence community”. For example, when “objective analysis” by Ambassador Joe Wilson found that no yellowcake uranium had been shipped from Niger to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, it was not enough to label Wilson as a “conspiracy theory”. Instead, the Whitehouse retaliated by dangerously and illegally exposing Wilson’s wife – Valerie Plame – in her undercover role as a CIA operative. This criminal act from the Whitehouse undermined years of earned trust Plame had tediously developed in her career protecting America.
The intimidation of the media is turning into a brand of state-controlled propaganda. Many people who are knowledgeable about world affairs from specialized sources are aware that corporate media has placed journalists under a “gag order” on covering important aspects of the Afghanistan war, Global Warming and the environment, covert and dangerous atmospheric experiments, illegal biological weapons experiments, illegal weather weaponization with toxic chemicals, consequences of Patriot Act and Military Commissions Act to gut the Bill of Rights with denial of Habeas Corpus, and more.
Readers are growing tired of paying for publications they know deliver little more than conservative, corporate bias with editors who remain employed by acting as gatekeepers with a choke-hold on the Truth.