{"id":106027,"date":"2018-02-05T12:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T12:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=106027"},"modified":"2018-02-03T19:47:38","modified_gmt":"2018-02-03T19:47:38","slug":"remembering-investigative-journalist-robert-parry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/02\/remembering-investigative-journalist-robert-parry\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Investigative Journalist Robert Parry"},"content":{"rendered":"

What made Bob Parry a trailblazer for independent journalism also made him a bridge burner with the media establishment.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Investigative journalist Robert Parry is pictured in Washington, DC, in February 1987.
(AP Photo)<\/p><\/div>\n

29 Jan 2018 – <\/em>After Robert Parry died on January 27, I asked another great investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, for some words. \u201cI ran into Bob more than three decades ago when he was the first to warn of the Iran\/Contra affair, to little avail,\u201d Hersh replied. \u201cHe was widely seen over the next years as a critic of the mainstream media in America. That was not so. He was a critic of lousy reporting, be it in Pravda<\/em> or The New York Times<\/em>. He wanted every journalist, everywhere, to do the research and the interviewing that it takes to get beyond the accepted headline.\u201d<\/p>\n

What made Bob Parry a trailblazer for independent journalism also made him a bridge burner with the media establishment. He refused to take on faith the official story, whether from governments or news outlets. After winning acclaim, including a Polk Award, as an Associated Press reporter who broke many big stories on deadly US policies in Central America, he spent three years at Newsweek<\/em>\u2014where he saw top editors collaborating with officials of the George H.W. Bush administration on what should be shared or withheld from the public. Bob left the magazine in 1990, and soon his relations with mainstream media had a whistle-blower quality. His 1992 book Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom<\/em> named names and pulled no punches.<\/p>\n

Midway through the decade, Bob did a stint as director of the Nation Institute\u2019s investigative unit. His writing for The Nation<\/em> during 1996 included pieces about the CIA and drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras, the bankrolled power of right-wing foundations, and a seven-page expose that is chilling to read more than 30 years later\u2014an investigative report on the Koch brothers.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Parry launched a unique journalistic space, Consortiumnews.com<\/a>, where he worked intensely as publisher, editor, and writer. For the next 22 years, Parry oversaw the website\u2019s scrutiny of elite wisdom. His work, which included authoring six books, won the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from Harvard\u2019s Nieman Foundation in 2015 and, last year, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.<\/p>\n

I got to see Bob at work up close, in 1996, when we co-wrote a series<\/a> on a media darling: \u201cBehind Colin Powell\u2019s Legend.\u201d During interviews, Bob was politely unrelenting. He had a methodical zest for plowing through documents, determined to \u201cmaster the material.\u201d And he was professionally generous; I wrote just a small proportion of the articles, but he insisted that I share the byline on every one.<\/p>\n

Bob was notably non-ideological. What propelled him was a moral core and determination to follow the facts. That devotion led him to expose the lethal deceptions and machinations of Reagan-era figures like Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, and Caspar Weinberger. Three decades later, the same resolve to separate fact from spun fiction put him on a collision course with the conventional wisdom of \u201cRussiagate.\u201d<\/p>\n

No one knew better than Bob Parry how intelligence agencies and major media outlets can create a cascading frenzy. Beginning in late 2016, Bob was prolific as he debunked the torrent of hyperbolic claims about Russia that became an ever-present flood across the US media landscape. Some progressive sites went from often posting his articles in 2016 to rarely or never posting them in 2017.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor years, the mainstream, establishment media have, by their malpractices in covering US-Russian relations from Ukraine to \u2018Russiagate,\u2019 been deeply complicit in the unfolding of this new Cold War and its unprecedented dangers,\u201d said Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen, a contributing editor at The Nation<\/em>. \u201cBob Parry, very often alone, exposed those malpractices, especially those committed by the powerful New York Times<\/em> and Washington Post<\/em>, misreported story by misreported story, sometimes daily. For this, he was ostracized, slurred, certainly ignored by mainstream media.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of December, a week after his first stroke left him with badly blurred eyesight, Bob somehow was able to write what turned out to be his final article<\/a>, brilliant and transcendent, a kind of cri de coeur that is a stunning last testament to \u201cthe journalistic principles of skepticism and evenhandedness.\u201d Western journalists, he wrote, \u201cnow apparently see it as their patriotic duty to hide key facts that otherwise would undermine the demonizing of Putin and Russia. Ironically, many \u2018liberals\u2019 who cut their teeth on skepticism about the Cold War and the bogus justifications for the Vietnam War now insist that we must all accept whatever the US intelligence community feeds us, even if we\u2019re told to accept the assertions on faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the close of a lengthy tribute<\/a> that appeared the day after his father\u2019s death, Nat Parry wrote that, \u201cultimately, Bob was motivated by a concern over the future of life on Earth. As someone who grew up at the height of the Cold War, he understood the dangers of allowing tensions and hysteria to spiral out of control, especially in a world such as ours with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out all life on the planet many times over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Parry carried the lantern high. Now others will need to carry it on.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon is a journalist with ExposeFacts.org<\/a>, a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy; the author of <\/em>War Made Easy; and a co-founder of RootsAction.org<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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