American Dispatches: The Journalism of Robert Parry

A collection of the journalism of the late Robert Parry, a premier investigative journalist who founded this site in 1995, has just been published. 

American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader

Edited and with an afterword by Nat Parry; foreword by Diane Duston

A new compilation of Robert Parry’s writings, American Dispatches: A Robert Parry Reader, provides an illuminating history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – a troubling recent past that Parry meticulously chronicles through in-depth research and compelling storytelling. The book, just published by iUniverse, documents how the deterioration of the U.S. media’s commitment to providing an honest accounting of current events has enabled corruption and wrongdoing at the highest levels of government.

Among the many hard-hitting stories that can be found in the reader:

• Mafia influence in state and local governments
• The full story of the Reagan administration’s illegal use of arms sales to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s
• How the U.S. government looked the other way as drug traffickers imported cocaine into the United States
• The government’s development of sophisticated propaganda techniques to influence American public opinion
• How the U.S. enabled and covered up war crimes, atrocities, and genocide in Central America
• The development of crippling – and morally questionable – economic sanctions as a go-to policy option in achieving geopolitical objectives
• The politicization of intelligence and abuses of power by the CIA
• What’s known and not known about the Reagan campaign’s interference with President Carter’s efforts to free U.S. hostages held in Iran in 1980
• How the U.S. supported an unconstitutional regime change in Ukraine in 2014, leading to eight years of civil war and today’s conflict with Russia
• The use of official lies and distortions by the government and media to sell endless military interventions to the American people

Comprising nearly 100 articles published from 1971 to 2018, American Dispatches traces Parry’s development from a student activist to a beat reporter to an investigative journalist and historian, explaining how he came to believe that the Washington press corps had failed the American people at key turning points of U.S. history.

Readers of the book may come to the same conclusion that Parry did: that one of the most important tasks that exists today is to build a new infrastructure for conveying information – one that is honest, independent, and incorruptible.

After breaking many of the Iran-Contra Affair stories while working at The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Parry went on to become a pioneer in online journalism when he launched Consortium News in 1995.

During his career, Parry reported from Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Israel and Haiti. He worked for Bloomberg News from 2000-2004 and taught at the New York University Graduate School of Journalism.

He received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984, The Associated Press Managing Editors Association Award in 1985 for Top AP Reportorial Performance, the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence in 2015, and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2017. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

Before passing away in 2018, he published several books, including:

Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom (1992), Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery (1993), The October Surprise X-Files: The Hidden Origins of the Reagan-Bush Era (1996), Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ (1999), Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (2004), Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush (2007), and America’s Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama (2012).

American Dispatches was compiled and edited by Nat Parry, the son of Robert Parry and former assistant on many of his independent media projects, who also provided an afterword for the book. The foreword was written by Diane Duston, Robert Parry’s widow and former colleague at The Associated Press.

$28.99 | https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/842300-american-dispatches

American Dispatches can be ordered directly from iUniverse and at major online retailers. For a PDF review copy, please contact editor Nat Parry at [email protected] or +45 6010 8177.