Friday 29th of March 2024

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American Pravda: Giants Silenced by Pygmies

 

Media Suppression of Our Leading Journalists and Scholars

 

By 

 

The Unz Review • An Alternative Media Selection

 

A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media

 

 

Glenn Greenwald and The Intercept

 

During the height of the NSA disclosures a few years ago, Glenn Greenwald probably ranked as the world’s most famous journalist, and his entire career had seemed something out of a left-liberal storybook.

 

Becoming disenchanted with his corporate law career at a top firm, he co-founded a small practice specializing in First Amendment issues, then started a personal blog denouncing the civil liberties violations of the Bush Administration. He gained such recognition for his insightful commentary that he was hired by Salon, the premier leftist webzine, and a couple of years later was recruited by the liberal Guardian, then at the height of its international reputation. His high-profile writings on governmental abuses drew the attention of Edward Snowden, the young NSA whistleblower, who offered him the story of a lifetime, complete with its James Bond flourishes in Hong Kong, and worldwide fame together with a Pulitzer Prize soon followed. No sooner had the echoes of those establishment accolades begun to fade than he returned to the front-pages as co-founder of a new international media organization aimed at providing honest reporting free from any political restrictions, an enterprise backed by a pledge of $150 million in future funding from a public-spirited Silicon Valley multi-billionaire. That truly seemed a Cinderella tale complete with happy ending, fit to inspire future generations of liberal young journalists.

However, the story didn’t end at that point. The old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons of my childhood always included a “Fractured Fairy Tales” segment, providing a satirical account of what probably happened after the curtain came down, and over the past year Greenwald’s personal trajectory unexpectedly swerved into that territory. In late 2020, he angrily departed the sizable anti-censorship media empire he had helped to create because his own writing was being censored, choosing to return to his roots as an independent blogger on the new Substack platform.

As far as I can tell, none of his ideological positions had shifted more than a whit over the last decade or more, but the same views that had once enshrined him as the conquering hero of liberal and left-liberal journalists have now suddenly rendered him toxic and unwanted in those same quarters, with his sole remaining foothold in the traditional media being his regular appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight, a FoxNews broadcast regularly attacked as representing the most extreme rightwing fringe still found on television. For at least three generations, American liberals had regarded our national security organs—the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI—as some of their greatest villains, with such hostile sentiments reaching their peak just a few years ago when Greenwald and Snowden revealed the massive scale of illegal NSA spying. Yet these days, former high-ranking CIA, NSA, and FBI officials are regularly featured and employed at liberal CNN and MSNBC, while it is Greenwald and Snowden who have become completely unwelcome. So we have a fable that ends with the brave knight slaying the beautiful princess and marrying the hideous dragon, quite an unexpected turn of events.

 

The breaking point for Greenwald came with the 2020 election. During the Democratic primaries, the reigning political oligarchs of the liberal establishment had faced down the unexpectedly strong Bernie Sanders insurgency by desperately employing every possible connivance to drag the widely unpopular Joe Biden across the finish line, then coupled him with Kamala Harris, a candidate so unappealing that she had dropped out of the presidential race long before the first vote had even been cast in Iowa. These arrogant Democratic kingmakers then discovered to their horror that although Donald Trump was greatly disliked, their own hand-picked candidates fell into the same category. An extremely dishonest racial media narrative had provoked America’s greatest wave of urban riots and looting in two generations, and while 200 of our cities suffered such severe unrest, a number of prominent Democratic activists responded to the scenes of chaos and disorder by loudly proclaiming that the solution was to “defund the police.”

Under such circumstances, many voters understandably began to wonder whether Trump—notwithstanding his disastrous four years in office—might actually be the lesser of the two evils. So to forestall that dangerous possibility, Big Media and Big Tech colluded to ensure that Americans voted the right way, imposing the most extreme political censorship of any modern election, yet even so their efforts nearly fell short.

According to the post-election media headlines, Biden won the 2020 race by a substantial margin and Trump’s claims of a stolen presidential vote represented the final proof of his criminal insanity, blatant lies that eventually provoked his deluded followers into storming the Capitol on January 6th. But as I pointed out a few days after that event, the official vote count told an entirely different story:

Incumbent Donald Trump lost Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by such extremely narrow margins that a swing of less than 22,000 votes in those crucial states would have gotten him reelected. With a record 158 million votes cast, this amounted to a victory margin of around 0.01%. So if just one American voter in 7,000 had changed his mind, Trump might have received another four years in office. One American voter in 7,000.

Such an exceptionally narrow victory is extremely unusual in modern American history…Indeed, with the sole exception of the notorious “dangling chads” Florida decision of the 2000 Bush-Gore election, no American presidential candidate in over 100 years had lost by so narrow a voter margin as Donald J. Trump…

Not long before the election, the hard drive of an abandoned laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter revealed a gigantic international corruption scheme, quite possibility involving the candidate himself. But the facts of this enormous political scandal were entirely ignored and boycotted by virtually every mainstream media outlet. And once the story was finally published in the pages of the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, all links to the Post article and its website were suddenly banned by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to ensure that the voters remained ignorant until after they had cast their ballots.

Renowned international journalist Glenn Greenwald was hardly a Trump partisan, but he became outraged that the editors of the Intercept, the $100 million publication he himself had co-founded, refused to allow him to cover that massive media scandal, and he angrily resigned in protest. In effect, America’s media and tech giants formed a united front to steal the election and somehow drag the crippled Biden/Harris ticket across the finish line.

The Hunter Biden corruption scandal seemed about as serious as any in modern presidential election history and Biden’s official victory margin was just 0.01%. So if the American voters had been allowed to learn the truth, Trump almost certainly would have won the election, quite possibly in an Electoral College landslide. Given these facts, anyone who continues to deny that the election was stolen from Trump is simply being ridiculous.

 

Although Greenwald was certainly the most prominent liberal journalist to find himself censored and left ideologically homeless for remaining true to his longstanding principles, other significant figures shared his plight. During the Financial Meltdown a decade ago, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone had gained widespread attention for his trenchant description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire-squid” and during his years as a Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, Chris Hedges had become a folk-hero to the Left for his incisive reporting on the plight of the Palestinians, with his later books cementing that reputation. In the wake of Greenwald’s angry departure from the Intercept, these two individuals spent a half-hour condemning the severe regime of self-censorship that was increasingly constricting the world of mainstream American journalism, with the conversation taking place on Russia’s RT channel, the only venue that would permit such a candid discussion. And Taibbi soon joined Greenwald in making his new home on Substack.

 

As the first anniversary of his personal strike for editorial freedom came around, Greenwald published a very long and interesting column analyzing what had happened, including an examination of the underlying problems he had faced at his own publication.

His difficulties had begun in 2015 with the rise of Donald Trump, a development that provoked a hysterical reaction in the establishment wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties, which became far more severe after Trump’s unexpected 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton.

Instead of asking themselves why they and their policies had grown so unpopular that a brash outsider who had been massively outspent on advertising could win, leading Democrats instead curled themselves into a fetal ball, adopting the lunatic excuse that Russian President Vladimir Putin had arranged Trump’s elevation, somehow managing to overcome their multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign with the help of a few thousand dollars of display ads on Facebook.

Only individuals with no sense of reality or no self-respect could swallow such absurdity with a straight face, but those debilitating conditions turned out to be widespread within our establishment media and political worlds, and this bizarre Russiagate narrative dominated the first couple of years of the Trump presidency, reducing American politics to a laughingstock. Those few prominent journalists such as Greenwald who refused to endorse such conspiratorial nonsense and pointed to the total lack of supporting evidence were increasingly ostracized as heretics and excluded from most mainstream outlets.

Greenwald provided a very revealing analysis of the internal dynamics at his own publication, The Intercept, so lavishly funded by its billionaire-donor Pierre Omidyar. All of us have particular areas of focus and expertise, possessing solid knowledge in those matters while remaining ignorant and easily misled in others. So while Omidyar probably had a good personal understanding of technology, business, and investment, he was politically unsophisticated and therefore accepted the overwhelming media narrative that Russia with Trump as its agent was plotting to subvert our American freedoms, just as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all loudly proclaimed. Over the years I have had a few dealings with individuals very high in the worlds of business and finance, and in most cases I think their political sophistication approximated that of your pleasant next-door neighbor, so Greenwald’s account rings very true to me.

Shrewd political operatives are always seeking out such wealthy, public-spirited individuals, hoping to help lighten the burdensome weight of their excessive bank balances, and Omidyar soon became a leading funder of the various organizations established to save our country from the looming Russian takeover, including those staffed by the Bush Neocons whose horrific policies had originally inspired Greenwald’s own journalism.

Outside observers began noting the considerable irony that Greenwald had become one of the foremost critics of his own patron’s political organizations, and wondered how much longer such apparent insubordination would be tolerated. To Omidyar’s enormous personal credit, he repeatedly emphasized that the journalists he supported had the absolute right to take whatever positions they wished even if these directly contradicted his own personal beliefs, and he never hinted that Greenwald should curb his outspokenness.

But star reporters with global reputations may be willing to take professional risks that their less talented counterparts would shun, and Greenwald was much less kind in describing the behavior of his colleagues on the Intercept, especially the very well paid and top-heavy senior editorial staff. After Greenwald’s departure, his ally Max Blumenthal Tweeted out his outrage at the unjustified salaries of Omidyar’s beneficiaries:

 

The Intercept’s Betsy Reed, who earns $427,419 a year & produces zero journalism of her own, mocks independent journalists who rely on Substack & Patreon to get by. Not everyone has a reclusive billionaire to pay them huge sums to edit stuff no one reads. https://t.co/TdnjrDdinw pic.twitter.com/83FMDhpRgQ

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 30, 2020

 

These are difficult times for the journalistic profession, with low salaries and widespread layoffs, but so long as Omidyar’s funding continued, the employees of the Intercept enjoyed lavish compensation, generous expense accounts, and total job security despite the extremely meager readership of their uninspiring output. Therefore, as Greenwald explained, their entire writing became directed at a total audience of one, Pierre Omidyar, who constituted the god of their universe, and they naturally catered to every whim of his views, as regularly revealed on his Twitter feed. If the billionaire’s swarm of courtiers and consultants had persuaded him that Trump and Russia were the greatest twin threats to American freedom, the writers and editors drawing his paychecks would eagerly produce a mountain of words saying exactly that. Applying another one of Greenwald’s metaphors, they realized that they had been lucky enough to win the Omidyar Lottery, and were fearful of risking that golden meal-ticket.

And although he is too charitable to say so, I think Greenwald must have realized that his colleagues probably considered him a dangerous threat to their own job security. By a very wide margin, he was the most prominent journalist on Omidyar’s payroll, and perhaps at some point his argument that Russiagate was indeed a ridiculous hoax might carry the day in the public arena. But if the naive billionaire eventually concluded that he had been hoodwinked, he might grow angry at the legions of his well-paid yes-men who had spent years participating in that deception, and perhaps cancel their generous sinecures.

 

 

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

 

Greenwald may have been cast into the outer darkness by most of the mainstream liberal establishment, but he ultimately suffered little damage. His angry departure from the Intercept unleashed a media thunderclap, and from the moment he regained his editorial freedom on Substack, he began producing a series of lengthy and remarkably incisive columns, so that within a couple of weeks I read more of his work than I had in the previous five or six years. Others seem to have had the same reaction, and his personal Substack subscription revenue quickly exceeded a million dollars a year, an achievement that surely aroused enormous envy from the multitude of timorous and mercenary journalists content to churn out safe and inoffensive blather.

 

But while Greenwald probably ranked as the world’s most famous journalist, he was always paired in my mind with the world’s most famous publisher, and the latter had suffered a far worse fate the previous year. On April 11, 2019 British police physically dragged Julian Assange, bearded and disheveled, out of the room in London’s Ecuadorean Embassy that had become his refuge turned prison cell during the previous seven years.

Assange had founded the WikiLeaks website in 2006, allowing disgruntled individuals to anonymously deposit confidential information embarrassing to governments and other powerful entities, with that content then made available to journalists and activists across the world. In 2010, an American intelligence analyst had provided a huge cache of Iraq and Afghanistan War documents and videos that rocketed the website to worldwide fame and inflicted a massive propaganda defeat upon our national security establishment. Assange and his tiny band of volunteer collaborators immediately became the toast of left-liberals in America and throughout the world, hailed as a journalistic pioneer and hero. Such strong public support partly shielded Assange from immediate retaliation, but the minions of our Deep State regarded him as their sworn enemy, and they relentlessly began seeking revenge.

Allegations of Assange’s sexual misconduct while visiting Sweden led to his late 2010 detention in Britain, and his supporters correctly suspected the entire judicial maneuver was merely a ploy to have him extradited to stand trial in America. Facing a losing legal battle, he broke the terms of his bail in 2012 and sought sanctuary at the local Ecuadorean Embassy, whose government granted him asylum. Over the years, Greenwald and numerous others have noted that Assange’s publication of confidential documents was no different than the regular activities of ordinary journalists and in 2013 the U.S. Justice Department even admitted that fact, but our national security establishment still sought to make an example of him as a powerful deterrent to others.

The political landscape drastically changed in 2016 when WikiLeaks published a huge trove of Democratic Party emails, including revelations that the DNC leadership had collaborated with Hillary Clinton to defeat Bernie Sanders. This confidential material proved extremely embarrassing to the Clinton campaign as it was released during the months prior to the November vote and certainly contributed to Trump’s upset victory. As a result, Democratic partisans and the liberal establishment began regarding Assange as their enemy.

Following the disclosures, the DNC claimed that its servers had been hacked by Russian spies, who then provided the material to WikiLeaks in order to assist Trump, and this became a major pillar of the subsequent Russiagate narrative in our media. The CIA and other intelligence agencies publicly endorsed that accusation of Russian involvement in American politics, an important step in the formation of what amounted to a Democrat/CIA/NSA/FBI political alliance hostile to both Trump and Russia.

However, various individuals associated with WikiLeaks suggested a different story. Not long after the original release of the emails, Assange strongly hinted that instead of having been obtained by overseas hackers, the material had actually been leaked by a disgruntled DNC staffer named Seth Rich, who had been murdered soon afterward, and WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information on that unsolved DC street killing. Although the mainstream media fiercely denounced such allegations as a ridiculous “conspiracy theory,” they were taken up by many rightwing activists and Trump partisans, and the details of the case fill an entire 10,000 word Wikipedia page entitled “The Murder of Seth Rich,” which includes more than 150 references.

The controversy is a complex one, with enormous numbers of claims and counter-claims, and I haven’t devoted even a fraction of the time necessary to unravel it. But the total collapse of the remainder of the Russiagate narrative leaves me skeptical about this element. Furthermore, Craig Murray, a former British ambassador and close WikiLeaks ally, generally strikes me as a credible individual, and back in 2016 he claimed from personal knowledge that the DNC documents had been leaked by an angry Democratic whistleblower rather than hacked by foreign agents, while last year he further emphasized the highly-suspicious nature of Rich’s murder and the new evidence that the FBI had been taking that theory seriously.

We must consider statistics and unlikely coincidences. There were only 135 DC homicides that year, and the victims were almost entirely restricted to the city’s impoverished non-white population or its criminal underclass. Indeed, although the city is still dangerous it wouldn’t surprise me if in 2016 Rich were the only middle-class white in DC randomly murdered while innocently walking the streets. The fact that he was a DNC insider and a technically-savvy Sanders partisan who died in an unsolved street killing so soon after the documents in his office were leaked certainly raises large suspicions. Billions of dollars were spent to put Hillary Clinton in the White House, and her victory would have meant many thousands of good jobs and appointments for her army of loyal camp-followers, plus oceans of possible graft, so the motive would be a strong one. As I speculated earlier this year:

Incidentally, I’d guess that DC is a very easy place to arrange a killing, given that until the heavy gentrification of the last dozen years or so, it was one of America’s street-murder capitals. It seems perfectly plausible that some junior DNC staffer was at dinner somewhere, endlessly cursing Seth Rich for having betrayed his party and endangered Hillary’s election, when one of his friends said he knew somebody who’d be willing to “take care of the problem” for a thousand bucks…

I should also mention the conclusions of some prominent intelligence experts whose opinion I take seriously.  Ray McGovern had served for more than a quarter-century as a CIA analyst, specializing in the Soviet Union, and by the late 1980s was chairing the National Intelligence Estimate and personally briefing President George H.W. Bush, while William Binney had been a top NSA intelligence officer, retiring in 2001. In 2017, the two of them, backed by dozens of other veteran American intelligence professionals, raised serious doubts about whether the WikiLeaks documents had been transferred locally to a thumb-drive rather than pulled across the Internet, suggesting that such technical evidence favored a leak rather than the hack proposed by the Russiagate narrative. Their claims have been disputed and the software evidence challenged, but the fact that such striking findings by these senior experts were almost totally ignored by our mainstream media demonstrated its enormous bias on the subject.

Assange’s dissemination of pilfered Democratic Party materials had probably helped to elect Trump in November 2016, thereby enraging liberals and Democrats. But just a few months later, the continuing hostility of America’s national security apparatus had been reignited when WikiLeaks began releasing the CIA’s “Vault 7” documents, providing the technical details of hacking capabilities and software tools targeting smartphones, computers, and other Internet devices. This represented the largest and most damaging leak in the history of the CIA, and its leadership publicly declared WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service, while quietly considering plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange.

Democratic Party political operatives and our intelligence services each possess a great deal of influence over the American mainstream media, and with both those groups having become so intensely hostile to Assange’s activities, the rapid transformation of his public image from hero to villain became almost assured. Many of the same journalists or publications that had once lionized him or even benefited from direct collaboration now regularly blackened his name and ignored his difficult plight.

 

 

Prof. Stephen Cohen and The Nation

 

The sudden burst of intense hostility towards Russia that swept through liberal circles during the mid-2010s had earlier eroded the position of another important figure once high within the liberal foreign policy firmament.

 

For decades Prof. Stephen Cohen of Princeton and New York University had ranked as one of America’s leading Russia scholars, and certainly the most prominent such figure in left-liberal circles. As far back as the 1970s his Sovieticus columns had regularly appeared in the pages of The Nation, our premier leftwing opinion magazine, and during the Gorbachev Era and the ensuing collapse of the USSR, I often saw him on the PBS Newshour, debating America’s Soviet policy with his conservative counterparts. Meanwhile, his numerous scholarly books on Soviet and Russian history were respectfully reviewed in elite mainstream publications. Not only was Cohen clearly the foremost Russia expert within the American Left, but no other name of even remotely comparable stature came to mind, and his 1988 second marriage to Katrina vanden Heuvel, who went on to serve as Publisher and Editor of The Nation for nearly a quarter-century, certainly cemented that impression of his influence.

Cohen had devoted his entire career to fostering an amicable relationship between Russia and America. But when Victoria Nuland and other Neocons gained influence during the late Obama Administration, they shattered that dream in an instant by orchestrating the violent early 2014 uprising and coup that replaced Ukraine’s independent-minded government with what amounted to an American quasi-puppet regime. Not only did this development threaten to push NATO to Russia’s border in absolute violation of the guarantees once given to Gorbachev, but it seemed likely to place the West in control of overwhelmingly Russian Crimea, home to Russia’s most important naval base, and only Putin’s quick moves forestalled that risk by restoring the peninsula to his country through annexation. A violent civil war and secessionist movement in the remainder of Ukraine quickly broke out, costing the lives of many thousands of ethnic Russians over the next few years, while periodically threatening to ignite a full scale war between Russia and the West.

Although this anti-Russian reversal seemed to attract near-unanimous support from America’s political and media establishment, in May 2014 Cohen had joined with his wife in publishing a Nation column denouncing the sudden eruption of this new Cold War against Russia. A few months later, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, and although I and others emphasized the uncertainty about which side had been responsible, virtually our entire media blamed pro-Russian forces, harshly condemning Cohen when he quietly expressed serious doubts. Indeed, his Wikipedia page catalogs the numerous attacks he endured, even citing a Chronicle of Higher Education article claiming that his writings had provoked the Nation‘s staffers into “openly revolting against the magazine’s pro-Russian tilt.” These lock-step young liberal and left-liberal journalists condemned him for continuing to advocate rational policies towards a Russia whose huge nuclear arsenal could annihilate our own country. After the 2016 election, nearly all Democrats eagerly embraced the Russiagate hoax and the hostility towards naysayers such as Cohen became even more strident. Except for his regular weekly appearances on New York’s John Batchelor radio show, hosted by one of his former Princeton students, he was virtually excluded from the American media.

A lengthy 2017 Slate interview by Isaac Chotiner typified his treatment. The author expressed stunned disbelief that Cohen did not automatically accept the factual claims about Russia, Russiagate, Trump, and Putin that were so universally believed and promoted within mainstream liberal circles, failing to recognize that a scholar with decades of expertise in that country and an ability to read Russian was able to tap non-American sources of information.

Just a few weeks earlier, Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg had published a long article in his own newspaper, describing his own visit to Moscow and his astonishment that the media there presented an “alternative truth” so different from his own belief that the Russian-backed Syrian government had recently launched a poison gas attack against its own people. Days before that article ran, we had published a 6,900 word article by eminent national security scholar Theodore A. Postol of MIT, heavily debunking the reality of that alleged Syrian gas attack, but since such contrary views never penetrated into Rutenberg’s media-bubble, he was entirely unaware of them, and having begun his journalistic career as a gossip-columnist, perhaps he anyway wouldn’t have known the difference. So Chotiner read Rutenberg and Rutenberg read Chotiner, and the resulting incestuous cult of ignorance had no place for the dissenting views of genuine experts such as Cohen or Postol.

In his 2017 Chotiner interview, Cohen emphasized that the combination of a relentless media demonization of Putin’s Russia and the creation of potential military flashpoints in Syria and Ukraine was producing an extremely dangerous world situation, a warning he regularly repeated in his weekly radio discussions. In one of his last broadcasts prior to his death from cancer last year at age 81, Cohen suggested that our current confrontation with Russia might be even more perilous than what we had faced at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, yet almost none of our insouciant media outlets recognized that our government policies were threatening to unleash a new world war.

Unfortunately, the editorial decisions of Cohen’s own magazine may have considerably diminished the impact of his very important message. The scholar was arguing our media and political policies were raising the terrible risk of war with nuclear-armed Russia, yet I don’t recall any Nation cover-stories highlighting that danger, and although its website hosted his weekly podcasts and very occasionally ran his articles, such material was usually buried in obscurity so that it attracted minimal coverage and discussion. Although this defensiveness may have been necessary to avoid a backlash from angry subscribers, the obvious result was to minimize the gravity of Cohen’s message. Why should Nation readers take his dire warnings of global war seriously if Nation editors apparently did not? Indeed, once I made arrangements in late 2019 to begin republishing and regularly featuring Cohen’s columns and radio shows, they attracted far more interest and supportive comments on our website than they did on his own, demonstrating the huge ideological hurdles he had faced from his own community.

Cohen may or may not have been aware of the eerie parallel between his own predicament and a similar situation that had unfolded at that same publication around the time of his birth in 1938. From 1900 to the mid-1930s, the Nation had been owned and edited by Oswald Garrison Villard, a name now almost forgotten but once one of the leading liberal figures of the era, co-founder of the NAACP and grandson of famed Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, while also ranking as one of America’s foremost anti-imperialists and anti-militarists. His father had been a German immigrant, and when he published writings critical of American involvement in World War I, his magazine was legally suppressed by the harsh wartime censorship laws, being temporarily banned from the US mails. But by the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of both elite and ordinary Americans had swung around to his position, and concluded that his opposition to our participation in the Great War had been correct all along.

Although he finally sold the Nation in 1935 during the depths of the Great Depression, the magazine he had run for more than three decades continued to feature his weekly commentary, which strongly supported FDR’s New Deal policies and fiercely criticized Hitler and the Nazis. But near the end of the 1930s, he grew alarmed that another world war might be on the horizon, once again involving America, and his anti-war views began sharply diverging from those of the other writers, so that his decades-long column was finally dropped in 1940. Diverting a sweeping ideological tide had proved as difficult for Villard in the late 1930s as it became for Cohen three generations later.

 

 

Sydney Schanberg, John McCain, and the Vietnam POWs

 

Cohen’s dire warnings about America’s anti-Russia policies gained little traction in the public debate, partly because the dismissive placement of his articles severely undercut their impact. About a decade earlier I had come across a very similar example, also involving the Nation:

 

 

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the subsequent official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-giants-silenced-by-pygmies/

 

 

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