Robert Parry,
The Media Consortium, Arlington, Virginia, USA, 1999
$19.95 (US) $25.00 (Europe)
ISBN 1-893517-00-4
Another important book from Parry, author of Trick or Treason about the so-called October Surprise. Parry has two major themes here. The first is the contra-cocaine story which he tried to research as it broke in the 1980s while employed by elements of the major media, PA and then Newsweek. The resistance to his research he met among the editors and managers of both organisations leads into his second theme: the largely successful attempt by the Reagan administration to bully and/or sweet talk the US media into not looking too closely at what it was doing in the Middle East and Central America. Put another way: as the Reagan administration reverted to the kind of aggressive imperialist behaviour not seen since the 1950s, it expected the US media to return to being the lap-dogs they were in the days of the Dulles brothers. And to a very depressing extent they were happy to do so. Parry wonders how the US media, which ran with the Watergate story and all its ramifications in the 1970s, ended up, less than a decade later, becoming accomplices to the murder of American nuns in Central America. Parry’s account of the major media’s timidity under corporate and political pressure may turn out to be the more important of his two themes.
Available from The Media Consortium, tel (US code)1-800-738-1812; or check the Consortium Website where details of this and other books as well as details of Parry’s excellent magazine, IF, are to be found: www.consortiumnews.com