From Consortium News
From our founding editor Bob Parry's first article on Russiagate in August 2016 to Patrick Lawrence's column on Monday, Consortium News has for nearly four years been in the forefront of skeptical analysis of a purported scandal that engulfed the United States but then ignominiously collapsed.
Throughout the years in which the American public was subjected to the daily gymnastics of the corporate media trying to brand Donald Trump as a Kremlin agent and Moscow as a destroyer of American democracy, Consortium News writers, led by Parry, methodically demolished what in the end was proved a reckless theory of conspiracy.
Parry did so in the name of pursuing critical, non-partisan journalism, for which Parry and his writers nonetheless were smeared as Trump supporters and Kremlin apologists. Being critical only of one's opposing party, which American journalism has devolved into, is no journalism at all.
In that first article, Parry provided an inkling of what was to come, identifying what would erupt into Russiagate as "this latest group think." That indeed became the case as the media whipped itself into a self-perpetuating frenzy in which at least 50 erroneous stories were published and cool evaluation of facts fell prey to partisan fervor.
"Today's Democrats apparently feel little shame in whipping up an anti-Russian hysteria and then using it to discredit Trump and other Americans who won't join this latest 'group think,'" Parry wrote. He went on, in a harbinger of things to come:
"While lacking any verifiable proof, Clinton's campaign and its allied mainstream media have blamed Russian intelligence for hacking into the Democratic National Committee's emails and then publicizing them through Wikileaks. This conspiracy theory holds that Putin is trying to influence the U.S. election to put his secret agent, Donald Trump, into the White House."
[See Parry's first Russia-gate story, "Hillary Clinton's Turn to McCarthyism," on Aug. 9, 2016, republished today.]
The late, great Robert Parry, on top of all of his many journalistic achievements, indeed deserves credit for debunking the Russia-gate madness from the beginning at his website Consortium News, well before others like me entered the fray. https://t.co/1Eph9D8S9h
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