American Dispatches

Often going against the grain of Washington’s so-called conventional wisdom, Robert Parry covered the most consequential issues facing the country during his five decades as a journalist – from the Vietnam War to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War to Russiagate, stories that shaped the course of contemporary American history. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and the recipient of numerous awards – including the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984, I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence in 2015, and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2017 – Parry earned a reputation as a tenacious reporter committed to telling the truth without fear or favor.

This compilation of Parry’s writings traces his development from a student activist to a beat reporter to an investigative journalist and historian, shedding light on how he came to believe that the Washington press corps had lost its way and that building independent media is essential to save the republic. More than a simple collection of articles by an iconoclastic journalist, however, this volume is an illuminating history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries – a troubling recent past that Parry meticulously chronicles through in-depth research and compelling storytelling.

What will come into focus as the reader turns these pages is an at times shocking level of corruption and wrongdoing at the highest levels of government, enabled by a steady deterioration of the U.S. media’s commitment to providing an honest accounting of the events shaping our world. The reader, perhaps, will come to the same conclusions that Robert Parry did: that the media has become a threat to democracy and one of the most important tasks that exists today is to build a new infrastructure for conveying information – one that is honest, independent, and incorruptible.