Contemporary journalism may be short on hard investigation. Sure got long, though, on accounts of its own critical role. Seems that for every yard of shoe-leather reporters don’t wear through, they will walk a ten-mile parade.
Robert Parry, an investigative journalist who died unexpectedly last month, deserved a parade in life. He didn’t get one. The man who broke the truly scandalous elements of the Iran-Contra scandal was relegated to the margins from the time he began to reveal the deceptions of Ronald Reagan.
Loathing for the extraordinary journalist by mediocre journalists did not end. Unable to find work in traditional press, Parry began independent, reader-funded website Consortium News in 1995. This was one of several sites whose traffic was drastically reduced last year following a policy announcement by Google, and one named by an anonymous source in The Washington Post as “fake news”.
Consortium was not fake news. Parry was anything but a fake newsman. He was a man given to read tedious documents and moved to investigate a story, not merely restate the views of powerful interests, such as that which holds that Russia determined the outcome of the US election. What he was not given to do was blow his own horn. No matter.
The “reporters” that decried him, those that also seek to delegitimise Glenn Greenwald for daring to insist that the Russia Collusion tale may not have its origins in fact, blow themselves. If you doubt that self-congratulation has become routine, or that independent reporting now appears in inverse proportion to claims of independent reporting, you need look to be swayed no further than last week. Compare the substance of the ABC’s “cabinet files” to the ABC’s own celebration of the information windfall they turned into a non-event. On ABC TV, we saw ASIO employees wrestle with kilograms of pages. On the ABC’s website we see — what is it? — 57 pages taken from about a half dozen files, even as we were told about “hundreds”.
The ABC head of investigative news, John Lyons, appears to me to believe that the investigation of classified documents starts and ends with state approval. The best he can seem to say of the ABC is that it does not behave like WikiLeaks, an organisation by which Lyons is “appalled”. Join a majority of your colleagues, mate, in both toasting the unlawful detention of the WikiLeaks publisher and in behaving per our leaders’ best hopes.
This was a craven attempt by the ABC to show itself as independent and trustworthy. The Lyons piece was itself reprehensible in what it disclosed about its source—any one of the sixty government agencies empowered to view our metadata could determine the man’s identity. But our man Keane has already given it to Lyons. Just as Lyons gave it to potential whistle-blowers: don’t come to us. Go to WikiLeaks. They won’t drop breadcrumbs leading straight to your address.
“Whither journalism?” It’s whither in the lav. Perhaps if journalists spent a little less time charting the decline of their own job security and/or boasting of their own brave opposition to “fake news”, they might produce news real and interesting enough to read.
As Keane wrote Monday, state restrictions on press freedom are very real, particularly in Australia. While restrictions imposed by Trump on news outlets are highly visible — get out of my pressroom! — they were just as strict, and terribly expensive, under the previous administration.
Again, I’ll leave it to Keane, a reporter wont to wear out his shoes, to describe the state apparatus in play to all but end press freedom. What I will briefly describe, in the memory of Robert Parry, is the censorship imposed by news workers themselves.
In the current climate, one is either “with us, or with the terrorists”. If one writes or broadcasts an account of real events that challenges approved narratives — broadly, News Corp and Fairfax — one will be friendless, possibly broke. Say that the Russia collusion stories, as Parry repeatedly did, have their origin less in fact than in the Clinton campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters, and you are a “Putin Puppet”.
Critique the trickle-down feminism of journalist Tracey Spicer, and you’re a misogynist. Say that WikiLeaks, which never reveals its source and continues its record of publishing only verified documents, has given us good material … well, you’re also a misogynist. Say that the ABC was not doing its job with the “cabinet files”, you’re a useful stooge for Rupert Murdoch. Probably a misogynist.
Geez, but Parry copped it. He copped it, but investigated and reported regardless. He reported to the end. In December, he suffered a stroke that robbed him of his sight. On the last day of December, mere weeks before his death, he reported again.
In a piece that any person truly opposed to “fake news” will find moving, a blind reporter apologises for not having updated his news service as regularly as he could. Then, he describes the sightlessness of a press so comforted by Oprah Winfrey’s recent false description. When Winfrey described news media’s “insatiable dedication to uncovering the absolute truth” news media applauded.
Parry would not have applauded. Among the “outcasts and pariahs” punished for refusing to restate approved narratives, he applauded only investigation.
He writes, “My Christmas Eve stroke now makes it a struggle for me to read and to write. Everything takes much longer than it once did – and I don’t think that I can continue with the hectic pace that I have pursued for many years. But — as the New Year dawns — if I could change one thing about America and Western journalism, it would be that we all repudiate “information warfare” in favor of an old-fashioned respect for facts and fairness — and do whatever we can to achieve a truly informed electorate.”
If Parry could write these truths paralysed in the weeks before death, perhaps some of our local reporters could strive to seek some others. Applause and social media approval must not matter. The true reporter must risk being a pariah.
A fine piece of baseball battery, H, with potency in the contrasts to local ‘survivors’.
I, too, found Lyons’ contribution re Assange and W’leaks to be the output of a particularly odious individual. Plus, given his claims were misrepresentations, at best (it was the operatives at the Grauniad who made the ‘security key’ available on their site, after Assange had reluctantly agreed to curate the data to spare the at risk from early exposure), Lyons’ contribution might best be described as “fake news”.
HR, extraordinary obit-huzzah for an extraordinary journo. Thank you so, so much. This, meanwhile, is an early candidate for Crikey line of the year:
‘Seems that for every yard of shoe-leather reporters don’t wear through, they will walk a ten-mile parade.’
Bravs.
Wow, I followed the nasty Reagan contra-gate story, but never gave a thought about the real journalism behind it. Thanks for remembering Parry the real hero.
Whoever bought and donated the Canberra filing cabinets to the ABC is probably the most pissed off person in Australia at the moment. More so if any photocopiers were in the lot and weren’t used. Maybe Crikey could market a list of reputable “drop-off sites”, and disreputable ones like the ABC.
Parry also helped Gary Webb with the “Dark Alliance” bust of Iran Contra drugs flowing to ‘Freeway Rick Ross’ in LA, and part of his reason for starting “Consortium News” came from the utterly disgraceful treatment meted out to Webb by the ‘journalists’ at the NYT’s, WaPo and the LA Times.
The Big 3 puts teams of people on to discrediting Webb, and they used bog standard ‘intelligence sources’ misinformation and dissembling to do it. Years later, in Congress, Webb was vindicated but, by then, he was dead by his own hand (maybe). Using the principle of the ‘efflux of time’, the vindication of Webb got buried.
Parry and Webb informed the work of Jeffrey St.Clair and Alexander Cockburn (“Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press”), various of Douglas Valentine’s efforts, and even the ‘fictional’ “Power of the Dog”, and later, “The Cartel”, by Don Winslow.
Winslow was fascinated by Parry’s and Webb’s work, and spent 5 years in Latin and Central Amerika researching for PotD, using Parry’s and Webb’s work as his roadmap.
Parry was a giant.
Excellent piece MzRaz, well worth the price of entry.
It’s a sad, sad situation we are facing and one which can only deteriorate, given the number of stenographers shaming the name of the Fourth Estate, eager to give tongue baths on cue to the powerful.
Thank you for posting this, Helen. How is it this is the first I have heard of Robert Parry? I guess your article answers this question.
Damon, you might like to Google (or DuckDuckGo) “Parry MH-17” to find another example of Parry’s exceptional and bolt rigid objective journalism.
And, for a bit of fun, try “Parry Russia-gate”
Thanks, Parry 🙂
The search string “Parry Russiagate” is like an antidepressant to me.
H, for a further boost to the spirits, you might like to try finding a talk Professor Stephen Cohen gave in early December. You can find it at thenation.com or, even better, because of the supplementary commentary, at unz.com.
Also try finding Tony Kevin and “Return to Moscow”. Kevin is a former Oz diplomat who spent his early years, and then some, at the Oz embassy in Soviet Russia. Last night I saw him interviewed by Oksana Boyko on “Worlds Apart” at (shudder, shudder) RT. A fabulous interview with a very intelligent, and concerned, Australian (who is still an Emeritus Professor at ANU).
Thanks, D. Also, the statements of Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former CoS to Powell, are pretty handy. They guy is now in his seventies and, like a few of the older intel and military guys, feels an obligation, perhaps guilt-borne, to be extremely frank. He’s not just strong on “Russiagate”, but challenges orthodoxy on Syria, Afghanistan, and is rather clear that Chavez and Venezuela were squeezed into impotence/starvation by the USA. Spent a lot of the weekend listening to and reading his stuff, and his assertion that US foreign policy continues to pursue the same goals set long ago, even under Trump, is fascinating. He’s now a Prof of IR and obviously a Realist, in chief. Still. That a disenchanted Republican (one who refuses to leave the party) can draw similar conclusions to, say, Immanuel Wallerstein or a local academic like Tim Anderson is really fascinating to me.
Anyone who explicitly sees the USA as empire in decline is very interesting, I think.
I would also like to restate your props to The Nation. Not always a fantastic read, but really insightful throughout much of the US election.
I recall they did a long series on Haiti, based on WikiLeaks docs and in partnership with Haitian journalists which was also grouse.
Wilkerson had a piece published at the NYT’s late last week. One indy outlet republished it with the headline (dunno what the NYT’s headline was – won’t read it);
“I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again.”
The “false choice”, of course, was Iraq, when he was Powell’s CofS.
This time he fears for war with Iran.
The indy outlet I read prefaced Wilkerson’s article with;
“The New York Times was one of the main forces in America pushing for the Iraq war, including planting misleading information in many stories in extremely suspicious circumstances.
The only reason we can imagine that they would publish an Op-Ed like this now is because they knew Wilkerson would run it in the alt-media anyway, and publicize the fact that The Times refused to run it. It creates a smokescreen of credibility to cover their relentless, pro-israel war-mongering.”
You might also ‘enjoy’ Greenwald from o/n, reflecting on a ‘misspoken’ fess up from the new Dutch Foreign Minister. For icing, try searching the new Foreign Minister and “laughing stock”.
Unfortunately for the new FM, he’s soon off to Moscow for talks with Sergey Lavrov. Lavrov will be like a kitten with a ball of wool, and then…….?
The world has not seen a diplomat of Lavrov’s calibre since Chou En Lai.