CN at 30: CN Launches 30th Anniversary Fall Fund Drive

Consortium News was born on Nov. 15, 1995. We are celebrating three decades of a strictly non-partisan, non-ideological approach to the news. It has made us enemies on both the left and the right.

The late Robert Parry, founder of Consortium News.

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

This month we are celebrating the 30^th Anniversary of Consortium News, begun in November 1995 by Robert Parry. Bob had a long and distinguished run as an investigative reporter for the Associated Press until he ran into editorial suppression of his stories. When it happened again at Newsweek, Bob quit to launch the first U.S. independent, investigative news site on the internet in the manner of his role models I.F. Stone and George Seldes.

I likewise ran into editorial suppression at the various powerful, mainstream media outlets that I worked for, and in 2011 I joined the consortium of journalists Bob had put together to report on suppressed news for this web site. I became editor-in-chief after Bob’s very untimely death in January 2018.

We’ve worked hard to keep Bob’s legacy alive: taking a strictly non-partisan, non-ideological approach to the news. It has made us enemies on both the left and the right from those who impose purity tests, herding people into political camps. Consortium News has always stood outside all camps and will continue to do so, whatever the consequences.

Our mission has been the same since 1995: report on news suppressed or distorted by corporate media, and follow the facts where they lead, letting partisan hacks (and extremists) on either side of the aisle be damned. CN provides what is routinely left out of corporate media coverage — on purpose — such as, among other things, the historical context without which one cannot understand the most consequential stories of the day — Ukraine and Gaza. They are completely distorted when it is reported that Ukraine began in February 2022 and Gaza in October 2023.

Consortium News does even more.  It has been in the forefront of several major stories in the past three decades: more revelations on Iran Contra and the October Surprise — among Bob Parry’s biggest stories; the WMD fiasco that led to the criminal 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq (and the creation of the Veteran’s Intelligence Professionals for Sanity — VIPS); the Ukraine crisis, from the 2014 Maidan coup until today; the fraudulent Russiagate scandal; the unconscionable U.S. prosecution of Julian Assange and the subsequent growing government-aligned suppression of free speech and a free press, especially connected to the attempted whitewashing of an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Over the next two months we will be looking back on the history of Consortium News and the many contributions it has made to journalism.

We rely solely on the generous contributions of readers and CN Live! viewers. This insures our independence. So please contribute a tax-deductible donation during our Fall Fund Drive. Our survival depends on it. Thank you.

Please Donate to CN’s 30th Anniversary Fall Fund Drive 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.