When the inspectors general at the CIA and the Justice Department issued reports in 1998 revealing that the contra-drug scandal was far worse than Webb (or for that matter, Brian Barger and I) had understood, Consortiumnews.com again was nearly alone in highlighting the new evidence of this major national security scandal. [For details, see Parry's Lost History.]
By then, the U.S. news media had grown obsessed with scandals of personal morality, from the O.J. Simpson murder case to Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. There was little interest (and indeed hostility) over the idea of looking back at the crimes of the Reagan and Bush-I administrations.
Meanwhile, the Reagan-esque theories of "free trade" and "self-regulating markets" had spread to the "centrist" Democrats of the Clinton administration. A stock market boom spurred by the Internet and a thriving job market appeared, at least on the surface, to validate some of those concepts.
The Bush Decade
By early 2000, I found myself again in a personal crisis. I had failed to attract significant funding to keep Consortiumnews.com going, at least on a full-time basis. Wealthy progressives and foundation executives were still turning a deaf ear to my warnings about the worsening media crisis.
A last-ditch appeal to the chairman of a major liberal foundation over a lunch in Washington resulted in him telling me that he saw no need to invest in media, that his organization was putting its money into building activist groups that would pressure President Al Gore to move in a more progressive direction after his presumed election in November.
When I sputtered something about my expectation that George W. Bush might actually prevail in Election 2000 in part because the major news media was pounding Gore over bogus claims that he had exaggerated his accomplishments the foundation chairman assured me that there was no way that the inexperienced and inarticulate Bush would ever become President.
So, at that point, I applied for and got a good-paying job as an editor at Bloomberg News, handling stories about securities regulation. Ironically, my arrival in March 2000 coincided with the bursting of the Internet stock bubble and a wave of regulatory scandals.
We kept Consortiumnews.com going on a limited, part-time basis. Though the Web site was updated much less frequently, we did post stories on the bias of the major news outlets against Gore and their kid-glove treatment of Bush and his widely respected running mate Dick Cheney. [For details, see Neck Deep.]
But we did not have the impact that we might have had if I had succeeded in convincing a few well-to-do individuals that honest media needed to be a major priority if the United States were to be steered away from fast-approaching cliffs of global and domestic crises.
As it turned out, Gore did win Election 2000 (both in the national popular vote and in the key state of Florida) but Bush succeeded in preventing a full counting of legally cast Florida votes and with the help of Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court seized the White House.
The major U.S. news media mostly stood by as this anti-democratic outcome was achieved. Indeed, the press corps appeared quite happy with the result. After eight turbulent years of Bill Clinton, there was widespread relief that "the adults were back in charge."
However, the new decade was soon hurtling toward grave dangers.
Despite lacking a popular mandate, Bush and Cheney pushed through more tax cuts and pressed for more government deregulation. On international affairs, the new President turned his back on Clinton's warnings about al-Qaeda terrorism.
The 9/11 terror attacks then opened the door to a revival of a Reagan-esque "tough guy" foreign policy. Gone was Clinton's multilateralism, replaced by American unilateralism. The neocons, who had been credentialed in the Reagan years, reemerged as the guiding hand of a new militaristic global strategy focused on throttling Muslim enemies of the United States and Israel.
After invading Afghanistan and ousting al-Qaeda's Taliban allies (though failing to get Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants), Bush quickly pivoted toward Iraq, which the neocons considered central to their goal of remaking the Middle East by force. After the conquest of Iraq, Iran and Syria were to be next on deck for regime change.
