Robert Parry Investigates, Like a Real Reporter Should
By BuzzFlash
Created 02/12/2007 - 5:58am
Published on BuzzFlash (
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles )
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
... the Reagan people were using this phrase, "perception management." They understood that if you could manage the perceptions of the American people through the information they got, making sure it was only your side of the story and that the facts from the ground were filtered out, then they could control the American population. They did not want to see Vietnam again. If they had to do foreign policy interventions, they didn't want the American people to become an obstacle to them. -- Investigative Journalist, Robert Parry
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Robert Parry is a journalist from the days when it was a profession that required skills and the exposure of the facts. Now, he runs a terrific website called consortiumnews.com that continues -- on a threadbare budget -- the tradition of journalism that holds public figures accountable to the truth.
BuzzFlash talked with Parry about a variety of issues facing the transformation of the mainstream media into disseminators of infotainment and propaganda. But we focused on a story that Parry first broke in the '80s and then was picked up by the late Gary Webb, who became a victim of the de facto merger of the corporate media with the Republican Party and its mega-company biases (including securing marketplaces throughout the world by whatever means necessary).
Our interview with Parry is published at a timely moment.
Much to the shock of BuzzFlash readers, the mainstream press is once again going the route of letting the Busheviks "frame" America into a war. Not only is it using the same techniques and subterfuges that it used to lie us into the Iraq War, the media -- including the New York Times and Washington Post -- are once again swallowing the whole package after apologizing for being mindless cheerleaders of the deceit that led to the Iraq War.
Of all the tragic ironies, the use of our GIs as bait in Iraq -- where we shouldn't have been in the first place -- is being used to justify another war, with a country that was a natural enemy of Iraq until Bush invaded Baghdad. But don't expect to find those truths or that context in the mainstream corporate press.
The tale of Gary Webb, as we discussed with Robert Parry, not only illustrates many of the abject failings of the corporate press to hold national government officials accountable, it also involves many of the same people from the Reagan Administration now ignominously doing their dirty work for the Bush/Cheney war machine.
CONTINUED with interview with a REAL Journalist...
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/interviews/053&linkid=30705