journalism

Charlie LeDuff, Sh*t Show!: The Country’s Collapsing… and the Ratings are Great, Penguin, New York, 2018.
Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2018.

The delay of the socialist revolution engenders the indubitable phenomena of barbarism — chronic unemployment, pauperization of the petty bourgeoisie, fascism, finally wars of extermination which do not open up any new road.
— Leon Trotsky, In Defense of Marxism
While the citizens of the rich world are protected from harm, the poor, the vulnerable and the hungry are exposed to the harsh reality of climate change in their everyday lives…. We are drifting into a world of ‘adaptation apartheid.

“The fate of Julian Assange is unclear. Washington is determined that he be sent to the U.S. to face criminal charges, most likely under the 1917 Espionage Act. The British government is more than happy to make this happen. Even the Ecuadorians are in on the act. What we are watching unfold in front of our eyes is the criminalization of journalism.”

WASHINGTON — When Anya Parampil was attending George Washington University and saw her peers trickle into the university’s well-entrenched State Department pipeline, she knew that the path most commonly walked by her peers wasn’t for her.
Eventually, life led her away from a career in international diplomacy toward one in journalism, but not your average corporate-outlet journalism. Parampil did not want to toe the official line with her reporting; she wanted to use journalism to “question our ruling class and expose its abuses,” she told MintPress in an exclusive interview.

There are certain rules you need to follow as a journalist if you are going to demonstrate to your editors, and the media owners who employ you, that you can be trusted.

After reading The New York Times piece “The Plot to Subvert an Election” I put the paper down with a single question.

The death of Robert Parry earlier this year felt like a farewell to the age of the reporter. Parry was “a trailblazer for independent journalism”, wrote Seymour Hersh, with whom he shared much in common.
Hersh revealed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and the secret bombing of Cambodia, Parry exposed Iran-Contra, a drugs and gun-running conspiracy that led to the White House. In 2016, they separately produced compelling evidence that the Assad government in Syria had not used chemical weapons. They were not forgiven.

Note From Media Lens

This is a slightly amended version of the foreword to the new Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz – How The Corporate Media Distort Reality, published today by Pluto Press. Warm thanks to John Pilger for contributing this superb piece to our book.
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Journalists and free press advocates are responding with alarm to newly released documents revealing the U.S.

On Friday, August 31st, the neoconservative US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said “The 3 million Syrians who have already been forced out of their homes and are now in #Idlib, will suffer from this aggression. Not good. The world is watching.”