Parry's Key to Journalism: Not Caring What the Truth Is

Robert Parry's adage: “I don’t care what the truth is, I just care what the truth is" and his pursuit of finding evidence of coverups like October Surprise are guides to developing a real journalism.

Bob Parry died five years ago this week. I wrote an unpublished obit for him then, see below. 

I've thought about him and his untimely death a thousand times since, particularly with the onslaught of pandemic propoganda.

And especially his adage: “I don’t care what the truth is, I just care what the truth is.” 

I've quoted this in the years since and have been surprised at how few people get it. It’s quite Taoist to me. Parry was saying that he didn't have preferred outcomes.

That's why I didn't discount lab origins because it might -- might -- increase US-China tensions. Or might -- might -- benefit Trump. Or might -- might -- highlight profound problems in the "scientific" establishment. 

So many are in their sectarian silos, figuring how a certain report or idea will further or hinder what they think are (usually short-term) desirable outcomes that they've largely lost a hunger for what the truth is. It's all about parochial political calculation and little about actual standards of rigor. 

I didn't always agree with Bob, but he generally tried to deal with things at the level of evidence and argument, which is too rare a quality. 

I particularly thought about him at the beginning of the pandemic because of his work on October Surprise -- the supposed "conspiracy theory" that the incoming Reagan administration made a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the release of the US hostages in Iran to deny Jimmy Carter an "October Surprise" in 1980 so he could hold on to the White House. 

I wrote to my former colleagues at FAIR early on in the pandemic of the Covid origins story: "Right now, it feels like October Surprise. We can't prove things, but I can show that the MSM are not being straight forward at all in how they have covered this." But they, like much of "the left" would buy into the establishment narrative in disastrous manner. And tragically, Consortium News, which Robert Parry founded, scandalously did virtually nothing useful on pandemic origins and related issues, particularly in the first formative year of the story. 

Indeed, I've thought many a time about how the deaths of Edward Herman, Alexander Cockburn, Michael Ratner and Bob Parry left us so vulnerable to the onslaught of pandemic propaganda which poses an existential threat to humanity.

Last year a reader of Bob's work: American Dispatches was released, edited by one of his sons, Nat, and his wife, Diane Duston, who are also journalists. 

I tried to get the National Press Club to run the obit below shortly after Bob died, but was told he wasn't a member and they don't run obits for non-members regardless of how important they are. It's a relief to have Substack despite its shortcomings. To be a writer and not have to run around being a salesman to different outlets. I'd rather just focus on what the truth is. 

--Sam Husseini 

Journalist Robert Parry Dead at 68, Known for Iran-Contra Revelations, Founded Consortium News

Journalist Robert Parry, who worked at AP, Bloomberg, PBS's "Frontline," Newsweek and his own ConsortiumNews.com, died on January 27 at the age of 68.

The New York Times noted the "tenacious investigative reporter and author who exposed details of the Reagan administration’s secret support for Nicaraguan rebels in the 1980s" died of pancreatic cancer. 

The Iran-Contra scandal, which included revelations that -- with U.S. hostages in Lebanon -- the Reagan administration had illegally funneled some of the profits of missile sales to Iran to the Nicaraguan Contras, would dominate much of the second Reagan administration.  

Parry in recent years continued scrutinizing many of the central claims of the establishment and major media. His pieces in the last year included include “The Lost Journalistic Standards of Russia-gate,” “Trump Falls in Line with Interventionism” and “Why Not a Probe of ‘Israel-gate’?”

Seymour Hersh told The Nation that Parry "was widely seen over the next years as a critic of the mainstream media in America. That was not so. He was a critic of lousy reporting, be it in Pravda or The New York Times. He wanted every journalist, everywhere, to do the research and the interviewing that it takes to get beyond the accepted headline.”

The media watch group FAIR noted that Parry "did some of the most important work investigating the 1980 Reagan campaign’s efforts to delay the return of U.S. hostages held in Iran, a scandal known as the October Surprise. ... Frustrated with the limits and compromises of corporate media -- he was once told that a story on Contra financial skullduggery had to be watered down because Newsweek owner Katharine Graham was having Henry Kissinger as a weekend guest -- Bob launched his own online outlet, ConsortiumNews.”

After suffering a stroke on Christmas eve, Parry wrote his final piece: "An Apology and Explanation" to his readers. After his death, one of his sons, Nat Parry, who co-authored a book -- Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush -- with his father, wrote an overview piece on his father's career and has continued the work of ConsortiumNews.com. 

Robert Parry's awards included the George Polk Award for national reporting in 1984. He was also named a finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 2015, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard awarded Parry the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence.

In 2017, he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in Britain. 

In his address at Harvard, he stressed the importance of not having preferred outcomes for stories: “I don’t care what the truth is, I just care what the truth is.”

His remarks at Harvard also included a description of how he found top secret documents about the October Surprise in an abandoned ladies room in a U.S. Capitol building. These documents were what initially compelled him to start ConsortiumNews on the Internet. 

In an in-depth interview with Mark Ames from 2017, Parry describes how he dug up parts of the Iran-Contra scandal, including by playing different factions of the Contras against each other. 

Parry was a friend of Gary Webb, whose "Dark Alliance" series in the 1990s for the San Jose Mercury News built on some of Parry's earlier reporting and made highly charged connections between the Contras and cocaine smuggling networks in the United States. That story was depicted in the 2014 film "Killing the Messenger.

Robert Parry's father was William Parry, publisher of The Middlesex Daily News in Framingham, Mass. He is survived by four children and six grandchildren as well as his wife, Diane Duston, also a former AP reporter.

Parry’s books include Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom, Trick or Treason: The 1980 October Surprise Mystery and America’s Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama.