Fooling America; How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom

New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1992. First edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Diane Duston (author photograph). 336 pages. Notes. Index. Minor edge soiling. A behind-the-scenes look at how government seduces the free press into abandoning hard investigation and insight. Former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter Parry calls on the public, press, and Congress to reassume their bipartisan responsibility to challenge Conventional Wisdom and uncover the truth. Robert Earle Parry (June 24, 1949 - January 27, 2018) was an American investigative journalist. He was known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare (CIA manual provided to the Nicaraguan contras) and the CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking in the U.S. scandal in 1985. He was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 and the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's Nieman Foundation in 2015. Parry was the editor of Consortium News from 1995 until his death in 2018. In June 2017, Parry was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Derived from a Kirkus review: Parry, a former A.P. and Newsweek reporter, offers a name- naming book on the herd mentality among Washington's opinion-makers and accuses the Reagan Administration of mounting a domestic disinformation campaign. The idea that Washington is ruled by conventional wisdom is itself fairly conventional wisdom. The overt point of Parry's study, then, is unsurprising—that nobody in our nation's capital can take a step not dictated by what he or she is supposed to think. But Parry also states that successive Republican administrations made an active, secret, and highly successful effort—using CIA-trained personnel and psychological warfare techniques—to suppress adversarial media outlets and to get Middle America to accept military intervention as a legitimate policy option. The Reagan and Bush Administrations' ``public diplomacy'' triumphs can be seen, says Parry, in the vilification of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the railroading of former US asset Manuel Noriega, and the willingness of Americans to go to war for a corrupt monarchy in Kuwait. Parry points the finger at Washington pundits, notably at The New Republic and The McLaughlin Group, who, he says, disseminated the White House line unquestioningly. The author—who appears to have a hard newsman's dislike of opinion journalism (``Rather than punditry, the public must insist on the facts, pure and simple'')—is credited with breaking the Iran- contra story for A.P., but his efforts to report the story fully, he says, were thwarted by Administration officials as well as by his superiors, and he seems at times almost bewildered with disillusionment. Earnest and troubling—though Parry's analysis of the problem is not a strong enough framework for his lengthy, digressive recaps of such recent history as Iran-contra and the Gulf War. The force and momentum of his major point, moreover, are often mired in the book's signal virtue: a mass of newspaper-style detail.