New Year’s Eve 2017: Bob Parry’s Last Article–A Manifesto on the State of Journalism

On New Year’s Eve 2017, less than a month before he would die, Consortium News founder Bob Parry wrote his last article, a manifesto on the remit of journalism and its threatened demise, a chilling forecast of what was to come.

It seems that since I arrived in Washington in 1977 as a correspondent for The Associated Press, the nastiness of American democracy and journalism has gone from bad to worse.

Rather than accept the reality of Nixon’s guilt, many Republicans simply built up their capability to wage information warfare, including the creation of ideological news organizations to protect the party and its leaders from “another Watergate.”

[consortiumnews.com]

This article should be saved and used for a substantial argument by anyone who cares about our information warfare with those they might attempt to awaken or have been called out on this reality by the indoctrinated.

{Though I don’t like the word “weaponized,” it began to apply to how “information” was used in America. The point of Consortium News, which I founded in 1995, was to use the new medium of the modern Internet to allow the old principles of journalism to have a new home, i.e., a place to pursue important facts and giving everyone a fair shake. But we were just a tiny pebble in the ocean.

The trend of using journalism as just another front in no-holds-barred political warfare continued – with Democrats and liberals adapting to the successful techniques pioneered mostly by Republicans and by well-heeled conservatives.

We saw similar patterns with the U.S. government’s propaganda agencies developing themes to demonize foreign adversaries and then to smear Americans who questioned the facts or challenged the exaggerations as “apologists.”}

Consortium News was the first Internet news source. More on that here [consortiumnews.com] why and how Robert Parry came to leave the changing atmosphere of MSM (main stream media) which many now refer to as MSCM (main stream corporate media). Within you'll find how the atmosphere of the political information arena was drastically turning towards perception management over citizens, the influx of tribal division that came to CN as Robert Parry confronted each political party and those within with an unbiased nature, as real investigative journalist should, how the 80's in this regard set the tone for what we face today within draconian and tyrannical measures forced onto the entire globe, due to a lack of critical thought needed to challenge this manufactured information. We've become a compliant society at the expense of the world society.

----with the U.S. government’s propaganda agencies developing themes---- Would lead us to the public relation firms, think tanks, and NGO groups that are owned and work for the ruling class. Obviously, for anyone genuinely awake, also own that US government. Where it is now known that they develop 80% of the ideology manufactured information delivered to us from the MSCMs. Anyone who challenges this capitalist system today is systematically algorithmic suppressed, falsely attacked within various means, and occasionally imprisoned. I will argue that today we are simply witnessing a collaborate 2 party establishment serving the same agendas for the benefit of the ruling class under a tight top tier leadership controlling the policies of the US....

{This approach was embraced not only by Republicans (think of President George W. Bush distorting the reality in Iraq in 2003 to justify the invasion of that country under false pretenses) but also by Democrats who pushed dubious or downright false depictions of the conflict in Syria (including blaming the Syrian government for chemical weapons attacks despite strong evidence that the events were staged by Al Qaeda and other militants who had become the tip of the spear in the neocon/liberal interventionist goal of removing the Assad dynasty and installing a new regime more acceptable to the West and to Israel).}

{More and more I would encounter policymakers, activists and, yes, journalists who cared less about a careful evaluation of the facts and logic and more about achieving a pre-ordained geopolitical result – and this loss of objective standards reached deeply into the most prestigious halls of American media.

This perversion of principles – twisting information to fit a desired conclusion – became the modus vivendi of American politics and journalism. And those of us who insisted on defending the journalistic principles of skepticism and evenhandedness were increasingly shunned by our colleagues, a hostility that first emerged on the Right and among neoconservatives but eventually sucked in the progressive world as well. Everything became “information warfare.”}

I have on occasions mentioned how activist groups today diminish their own goals by allowing their movements to be infiltrated by elite donations through back door collections and affiliation with an establishment party that always leads to controlled limited results that eventually leads to benefiting the elite and or their very corporations the activist would have us believe they're targeting. Beware of who you send your money to in regards to thinking you're supporting a genuine cause. You're most likely only supporting the income of one or more of the top board members.

{That is why many of us who exposed major government wrongdoing in the past have ended up late in our careers as outcasts and pariahs.}

Now you can only find a genuine sense of unbiased factual news on the Internet. This is also why you'll find some good people on RT America. Those that will challenge the capitalist imperial narrative will not be tolerated on MSCM.

{Legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who helped expose major crimes of state from the My Lai massacre to the C.I.A.’s abuses against American citizens, including illegal spying and LSD testing on unsuspecting subjects, has literally had to take his investigative journalism abroad because he uncovered inconvenient evidence that implicated Western-backed jihadists in staging chemical weapons attacks in Syria so the atrocities would be blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The anti-Assad group think is so intense in the West that even strong evidence of staged events, such as the first patients arriving at hospitals before government planes could have delivered the sarin, was brushed aside or ignored. The Western media and the bulk of international agencies and NGOs were committed to gin up another case for “regime change” and any skeptics were decried as “Assad apologists” or “conspiracy theorists,” the actual facts be damned.

The demonization of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia is just the most dangerous feature of this propaganda process – and this is where the neocons and the liberal interventionists most significantly come together.

The U.S. media’s approach to Russia is now virtually 100 percent propaganda. Does any sentient human being read The New York Times’ or The Washington Post’s coverage of Russia and think that he or she is getting a neutral or unbiased treatment of the facts?

For instance, the full story of the infamous Magnitsky case cannot be told in the West, nor can the objective reality of the Ukrane coup in 2014. The American people and the West in general are carefully shielded from hearing the “other side of the story.” Indeed to even suggest that there is another side to the story makes you a “Putin apologist” or “Kremlin stooge.”}

You only get that what controls your world perception. Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran,China, are the going top targets.

Lets start with Ukraine first. It's the most leading indicator that we're being fed bullshit which leads to basically explaining all the rest. And things they don't want you to know. Ukraine was virtually a non covered issue until Trump came along, 2 years later, time served as president up to his impeachment 2019, so we're looking at 5 years after the initial tyranny that took place in 2014. Who was the president then? That provides you the answer to who served under that person which is president now. Obama and Biden, right. The other side of the story they don't want you to know is that those 2 conducted an illegal regime change against a president who was in favor of working with Russia to installing a far right element who were supported by fascist elements. Who began a genocide program on eastern citizens on the Russian border. Still going today which is still being falsely narrated by our MSCM. Biden actually forced the firing of a prosecutor investigating an energy company his son was involved with, although he had no experience in the field, collecting 50k a month, as he threatened to hold back monetary support for weapons to the country until he was fired. If you're thinking that sounds like what Trump was accused of and impeached on, even though he was basically attempting to weight that as an intelligent option according to him, you're right. None the less, Trump never forced a firing and eventually sent the support. ?He was impeached? !?!WHY IS BIDEN OUR PRESIDENT!?!

I can relate that very scenario with every other country above in a number of regards but it would take more time then I know any of you want to put into reading it. Working within criminal actions with criminal terrorist that our MSCM will not inform us of. I will however leave one more thought. You know the fascist groups in our country who have been making big headlines for several years now? A Number of their members went to Ukraine to train with their fascist elements and brought it home with them. A good degree of the information via pamphlets and internet sources from Ukraine feed or have fed our fascist. They would very much like to see a race war and or a civil war take place.

{What is perhaps most alarming about the past year of Donald Trump is that the mask is now gone and, in many ways, all sides of Official Washington are revealed collectively as reflections of Donald Trump, disinterested in reality, exploiting “information” for tactical purposes, eager to manipulate or con the public.}