WATCH: Our 30th Birthday Celebration

Consortium News turned 30 years old Saturday. Robert Parry founded the first independent, online news publication in the U.S. on Nov. 15, 1995. We’re celebrating 3 decades of bringing you news others won’t.

Watch the replay of our Saturday night special with guests Ray McGovern, John Kiriakou, Patrick Lawrence and Mary Kostakidis on CN Live!

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
CN at 30

Thirty years ago today, on Nov. 15, 1995, former Associated Press investigative reporter Robert Parry founded a website he initially called The Consortium and later Consortium News.

Parry started online what two of his heroes had done on paper: the muckraking independent journalists IF Stone and George Seldes. Bypassing corporate media, Bob started the model for online journalism that blazed the trail for an explosion of independent media today that collectively is seriously challenging the dominance of mainstream media.

Consortium News gave the public two crucial things the mainstream didn’t: politically damaging stories to the Establishment, which corporate media suppressed, and angles the mainstream ignored, which provided essential historical context corporate media conveniently omitted.

Here is how Consortium News began in Bob Parry’s own words:

“In 1995, after more than two decades in the mainstream news media (AP, Newsweek and PBS), I founded Consortium News as a home for the serious journalism that no longer had a place in an American news business that had lost its way.

At the time, I was the lead journalist on what had become known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and I had watched first-hand as senior news executives chose to squelch that inquiry apparently out of fear that it would cause another impeachment crisis around another Republican president, Ronald Reagan.

Such a possibility was deemed “not good for the country,” a view held both inside Congress and in the boardrooms of the elite national news media. But I refused to accept the judgment. I continued to pursue the many loose ends of the scandal, from evidence of drug trafficking by Reagan’s beloved Nicaraguan Contras to suspicions that the arms-for-hostages deals with Iran started much earlier, possibly even during the 1980 presidential campaign.

The era of Watergate had come full circle. Instead of exposing crimes and cover-ups, the Washington press corps’ job had changed into harassing and mocking serious investigators the likes of Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh who stayed on the trail.

The Washington news media had drifted into a culture of careerism where top jobs paid well into the six- and even seven-figures. Your hair style and glib presentation on TV were far more important than the quality of your reporting. And the most important thing was to avoid the wrath of right-wing attack groups who would “controversialize” you.

By the mid-90s, it had become clear to me that there was no feasible way to do the work that had to be done within the confines of the mainstream media. The pressures on everyone had grown too intense. No matter how solid the reporting, many issues were simply off limits, particularly scandals that reflected badly on the admired duo of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Even when I obtained highly classified government documents in 1994-95 shedding light on how U.S. policies toward Iraq and Iran had evolved at the start of the Reagan-Bush era, this information could find no home even in the liberal outliers of the mainstream media.

So, on the advice of my oldest son Sam, who told me about this strange new phenomenon called the Internet, I started this Web site in fall 1995.

Besides seeing Consortium News as a place for serious journalism, I also envisioned it as a refuge for quality journalists who faced the same frustrations that I did.”

And that’s how Consortium News was born, as a consortium for mainstream journalists who like Bob had had their stories suppressed.

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

Bob’s Biggest Stories

Managing Public Perception, aka Propaganda

Bob uncovered important details on the C.I.A. In the Reagan administration working to manage America’s perceptions away from the critical thinking of the 1970s.

Iraq

There was virtually no one in the mainstream media who questioned the fevered march towards an unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. I was covering the U.N. for a Canadian newspaper chain that published the Montreal Gazette and the Ottawa Citizen and I was fired on the day of the invasion for having questioned the rationale and the legality of the invasion in my reporting from U.N. headquarters. Chris Hedges, today a member of Consortium’s board, had to leave The New York Times after he gave a speech opposing the invasion. That’s what it was like in the mainstream then.

But over at Consortium News there was open and repeated questioning of the Bush administration’s motive and cover story for invading a country that posed no danger to the United States. It was shortly after the invasion that the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, one of whose co-founders is with us tonight, was formed to follow up on the criminality of the invasion.

Ukraine

Bob was a real investigative reporter, a term that is very loosely appropriated today by many beginners in this trade. That he meant he spent months on a single story – in the days when news organizations spent real money on that sort of thing.

He also knew what it meant to be politically neutral. While he attacked the right from 1995, in 2014 he began to take on the non-partisanship that characterizes CN by attacking the Democrats too. It began in earnest with his and other CN writer’s questioning of the events in Kiev in February 2014.

Bob’s reporting led the way to establishing that a U.S.-backed coup took place then (a fact the mainstream still denies) and he explained the civil war that the U.S.-backed coup government unleashed on Donbass, leading to Russia’s intervention into the civil war in 2022.

Of course this led to baseless accusations that Bob and CN were in the pay of the Kremlin, blah, blah, blah, vicious smears that persist until today. That’s what happens when your factual reporting exposes an empire’s agenda.

Russiagate

In 2016, Consortium News was among the very first news organizations (one of our guests was the first) to expose the so-called Russiagate scandal as a fraudulent attempt to dress up Democratic Party opposition research as serious intelligence, which led to powerful U.S. intelligence agencies interfering in U.S. domestic politics at the national level – a very serious matter indeed.

Along with Bob, CN writers like Ray McGovern (also a guest tonight), Gareth Porter and Joe Lauria delved deeper into the deception of the scandal leading to even harsher accusations of being a Kremlin stooge, leading to disagreements with family and friends in a fiasco that still will not die – even though it has been definitely debunked.

CN Since Bob

My very first article in 2011 for CN came about as The Wall Street Journal, for whom I worked then, continuously suppressed aspects of a story I was covering about Palestine becoming an Observer State at the U.N. I sent one of these spiked articles to Bob and he published it. That day I became part of his consortium of mainstream journalists who found a way to get out his unapproved work.

Since I became the editor-in-chief of CN following Bob’s very untimely death in January 2018, Consortium News continued Bob’s work on Russiagate, Ukraine, and the Middle East, especially on Gaza in the past two years. CN also distinguished itself with its coverage of the persecution of journalist Julian Assange by the U.S. and British governments. Naturally that made us many enemies of those pursuing their own and not the public’s interests.

CN Live!

In the summer 2019 Consortium News began it’s webcast program, the one you are watching, CN Live! Bob Parry always wanted to do more video as he saw that that was the future in independent, online journalism. He had made a very rudimentary start.

At the beginning of 2018, CN videos were only watched in 5 countries. When CN Live! Started it was seen in 18 countries and by 2020 it was up to 48 nations. Today it’s 163 countries. CN Live! Made its mark especially in its coverage of the Assange case, nut also Gaza, Ukraine, the Epstein case and many more topics.

Most people are motivated by self-interest but not everyone, even though those who are, generally believe everyone is. Taking Russia or China or Iran’s or the Palestinian’s point of view into account is death for the career of a Western journalist. So why would Bob Parry and the many contributors to CN do that, except that they are motivated by something higher than self-interest.

I want to share these words by the late and truly great John Pilger on the 25^th anniversary of Consortium News:

“Consortium News was started 25 years ago by the late Robert Parry, one of America’s finest journalists. It is the newspaper you can no longer buy at the newsstand — an oasis of real journalism, which now needs your support urgently.”

Our guests tonight are former C.I.A. analysts Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou to discuss how they became dissidents and transitioned to journalism. And then two veteran, highly-accomplished, ex-mainstream media journalists, Mary Kostakidis and Patrick Lawrence, to discuss the state of media today and the increasingly influential role of independent media in challenging mainstream dominance.

Our first guest is Ray McGovern, probably the second most important figure in the history of Consortium News. On Dec. 28, 2011, Parry wrote:

“To my great satisfaction, we also began developing what might be regarded as unlikely relationships with former CIA analysts, such as Ray McGovern, Peter Dickson, Melvin Goodman and Elizabeth Murray. Though these CIA folks had been trained not to talk to journalists like me, it turned out they also were looking for places to impart their important knowledge.

I found that our experiences had run on parallel tracks. In the 1980s, as the Washington press corps was facing intense pressure to toe the Reagan-Bush line, the CIA analysts were experiencing the same thing inside their offices at Langley. It became clear to me that the Right’s central strategy of that era had been to seize control of the information flows out of Washington.

To do so required transforming both CIA analysts and Washington journalists into propagandists. The crowning achievement of that project had been the cowering CIA ‘analysis’ and the fawning ‘journalism’ that had been used to whip up popular support for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And that is where I fear we still stand, stuck in a dangerous swamp of disinformation, spin and lies.”

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.