LISTEN: During Consortium News‘ 30th Anniversary, Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria explains what independent media and ethics mean to CN.
CN Editor Joe Lauria made the following brief remarks at the Mut Zum Ethiks conference in Switzerland in August. The 7 m 43 s audio recording is above.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
CN at 30
We’re celebrating our 30th anniversary of Consortium News. Two of our columnists are sitting at this table. That would be Scott Ritter and Patrick Lawrence.
What does “independent” mean, when you talk about journalism? Mainstream reporters think that they’re independent. You know, Patrick and I worked in the mainstream. I may have not have thought that I was being independent working for The Wall Street Journal and the Sunday Times of London and Johannesburg Star and the Montreal Gazette, but my colleagues thought they were.
I mean, there’s even a newspaper in the U.K. called The Independent. What are they independent from? Are they independent of government? Are they independent from corporations, their advertisers, for example? Or are they independent from the public, from the interests of the public?
Journalism is supposed to be representing the interests of the public upon whom they depend for newsstand sales, supposedly.
But most of the money comes from the advertisers. I think that what the independent journalism that Patrick is talking about, that we’re talking about here today, is independent from government, independent from corporate interests, independent from the think tanks and the NGOs, the governmental, non-governmental organizations, governmental organizations funded by governments.
So what are the interests of big corporate power and governments in controlling and owning media?
They own the media mostly, the big media, which are owned by corporate entities. They are trying to defend and further their own interests, their own power and their own wealth. That’s what they’re about. And that opposes the public’s interest in most cases.
Therefore, we who are independent media, independent from those powerful interests, should be defending the interests of our readers, the public — the vast majority of the people of various nations in the West and elsewhere, who are often victims of these powerful interests.
And there’s two ways that that is done, in my view, and what we strive to do at Consortium News. We look at all sides of an issue, supposed objectivity. The independent mainstream is supposed to be doing that. But I mean, in a war, when your own side is in a war, do you necessarily always take everything that is said by your side to be true?
And if you don’t, of course you’re going to be called a traitor, aren’t you? Not only in war. In all international conflicts. I covered the United Nations in New York for 25 years, and to me, the United States was one actor in international dramas, one amongst many. Not the one, not the only one. Not the one that I’m supposed to report from their point of view.
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But of course, we see mainstream media reporting from the point of view of Western governments, basically, in all conflicts. Iran, North Korea, the Palestinians, they have no voice in Western mainstream media. So American people and European people – we don’t know these people. Unless you go there you don’t know them, because we don’t hear them speak in our media.
That’s really dangerous, to prepare to go to war against them, when we don’t know who we’re going to be fighting and killing. And in many ways, what I’m saying is the conflict we’re experiencing in the world, the major conflict between an emerging world of various poles of power, against a unipolar United States and its allies. If the U.S. becomes just one of many responsible players in the world, we might have something resembling stability.
I dare not say peace, but stability. What is missing from mainstream reporting and what we strive for at Consortium News, and other independent journalists strive to do, is to provide context. Context means everything in telling a story. Historical context. We cannot understand what’s happening in Gaza and Ukraine without it. Gaza: you must understand how Israel became a nation in 1948, that there were 700,000 people driven off their land to create this nation.
And you can read the diaries of Ben-Gurion if you don’t believe me. He says it. Or you could listen to Moshe Dayan, who in a 1956 eulogy to an Israeli who was killed by a Palestinian from Gaza, he said, don’t be surprised that they hate us. We are standing on their land. We took their father’s lands, their olive trees, their farms, and we are a settler nation who take this land with the steel helmet and the gun. They will be looking at us and they will one day reach out to grab us with their hatred. That day was October 7th, 2023.
And then Ukraine. We have to go back at least to 1947, 48. The end of the war, the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency, the end of the alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the opening of an office in New York City for a man called Mykola Lebed.
Mykola Lebed was a right hand man of Stepan Bandera. By the way, the C.I.A. did not want to work with Stepan Bandera. “He’s too crazy.” But the MI6 did. Yeah, MI6 worked with him, but the U.S. worked with Lebed and they set him up in an office in New York. And they sent him many, many times up until 1991, the start of Ukraine independence from the Soviet Union, to do sabotage operations and propaganda against the Soviet Union inside Soviet Ukraine.
And this shows the beginning of the U.S. relationship with Nazis in Ukraine, like Lebed. And all of this is in a U.S. government-financed study, by the way. I’m not making this up. I can send the details if anyone wants to see it. You could read the book about all of this, is what I’m telling you. [Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (2010) published by the U.S. National Archives.]
Fast forward to 2014, the continuation to the Orange Revolution and all of what happened up until 2014 – I’m not going to go though the whole history of Ukraine, but it’s important that journalists give the history. This is the point I’m making in independent journalism – to report on the coup d’état, in which the U.S. again hurt Russian interests in Ukraine to back the Western side.
And we know the history now. They provoked Russia to invade. Without question. Biden wanted this invasion because they thought they would win on three counts: a ground war with a proxy; an information war; and an economic war. And they’re losing all three, especially the economic and the information war — except in the West nobody believes this BS.
Russia did everything it could to avoid invading. They offered a treaty to NATO and the United States: you remove your troops from the forward deployments from the former Warsaw Pact nations that are now part of NATO, and take the missiles out of Romania and Poland, create a new security architecture in Europe — which the Russians had put forward in a treaty in 2009 very similar to that, which was rejected — or we take technical/military measures, and that’s what happened. They rejected it. Russia invaded.
This is what independent media should be reporting. Thank you.
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.
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