Consortium News

Editor Robert Parry wrote:We founded Consortiumnews.com in 1995 as the first investigative news magazine on the Internet. The site was meant to be a home for important, well-reported stories and a challenge to the inept but dominant mainstream news media of the day.

As one of the reporters who helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal for the Associated Press in the mid-1980s, I was distressed by the silliness and propaganda that had come to pervade American journalism. I feared, too, that the decline of the U.S. press corps foreshadowed disasters that would come when journalists failed to alert the public about impending dangers.

Also by 1995, documents were emerging that put the history of the 1980s in a new and more troubling light. Yet, there were fewer and fewer media outlets interested in that history.

The memories of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were enveloped in warm-and-fuzzy myths that represented another kind of danger: false history that could lead to mistaken political judgments in the future.

Some of our early articles reexamined important chapters of the 1980s (such as the “October Surprise” controversy from Election 1980 and evidence of Nicaraguan contra-cocaine trafficking). Other stories explored more topical crises (such as NATO’s war over Kosovo and the impeachment assault on President Bill Clinton).

Author Norman Solomon and I produced a groundbreaking series on the real story behind Colin Powell’s legend. Another of my investigations examined the remarkable story of how Rev. Sun Myung Moon became an influential player in Washington.

Working with talented freelance reporters around the world, we also undertook important historical investigations, such as how the Nazis after World War II — crossing “rat lines” from Europe to South America — contributed to the region’s bloody repression.